


The Hairpin Turn

by viviandarkbloom



Series: are we cool, vincent? [2]
Category: Last Tango In Halifax
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-28 10:31:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 48,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2729057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She is sleeping with a woman who drinks wine out of a coffee mug quite willingly, believes <i>Alien vs. Predator</i> is a 'great' movie, and has used a trash bag as a rain poncho."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. a minor statistical improvement upon Tuesdays

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel/companion piece to “The Wild Nothing,” so if you read this without reading that first, well, you may be a tad confused. 
> 
> Also, those are real IKEA furniture names. You know I do my research, people.

The sun shines down. It’s a beautiful day. Consider the hairpin turn. Do not choose sides yet.  
— Richard Siken, “You Are Jeff”

It may all end tomorrow  
Or it could go on forever  
In which case, I’m doomed.  
—Morrissey, “Picadilly Palare”

 **i. a minor statistical improvement upon Tuesdays**  

The first time after the first time occurs on a Tuesday and not, as planned, on a Monday. This suits Caroline, who believes that Tuesday is the worst day of the week; what better way of salvaging it than a mucky afternoon?

Years ago she had encountered a statistic—most likely on a chipper morning news show when she was bleary with hangover and mourning the loss of both youth and brain cells—claiming that depressed people were more likely to kill themselves on Tuesday than any other day of the week. She embraced this fact with the same fervent, irrational acceptance she displayed when informed by the mainstream media that chocolate and red wine can beneficial to one’s health. Perhaps becoming an alcoholic diabetic would be the best way to go anyway—lapsing into a permanent sugar coma while drunk sounds awfully painless to her.

Mondays have a bad rep. Because occasionally Mondays can surprise with a fresh if frail ideal of hope: The possibility of a do-over, of somehow making things better than they were last week. All your work clothes were clean and pressed and ready for the week, lined attentively in closets like a row of eager, battle-hungry cadets gleaming with untarnished naiveté. Then the luster of every shirt dimmed as all delicate hope was crushed under Tuesday’s hobnailed boot, as the week took on the same rigid, proscribed shape it always did—a dim tunnel, an alimentary canal that shaped life into a turd. The only problem is once you came out the other end you always went back in again.

Unsurprisingly, Caroline had come up with this shit metaphor during a particularly bleak moment in her marriage and after ingesting some sort of horrid black bean soup that gave her terrible stomach cramps. Even more regrettably, it put her off constructing ridiculous metaphors for a while in spite of the fact that these mental gymnastics frequently got her through the duller parts of the day.

Like this very minute, where she stands stupidly in her bedroom waiting for Gillian to show up.

They meet at her house because it’s empty, because the old people are off gallivanting in the middle of the day and the young people are at school or with friends, because it’s advantageous to Caroline to be on home turf. And because it’s Gillian’s suggestion—she likes the bed and the Spartan simplicity. “It’s like a fucking Swedish hotel,” she tells Caroline on the phone. Which prompts Caroline to ask Gillian when in her life has she ever been in a Swedish hotel, which leads to an argument about IKEA furniture and when is IKEA simply too much IKEA, and Caroline mounts a rigorous defense that most of the furniture in her home is actually _not_ IKEA but perhaps following a similar aesthetic line and who could really trust furniture with names like “Arkelstorp” or “Godmorgon” anyway, and this in turn escalates into a cranky exchange in which someone calls someone a “mad bitch who clearly needs to get fucked” and someone else retorts “well then, you better be up to it on Tuesday, you tired old twat.”

Afterward, in pure bewilderment, Caroline had stared at the silent phone. She had hoped having an affair—for she did not know what else to call this thing with Gillian aside from a “borderline inappropriate erotic entanglement,” which is just too long a phrase—would be a sophisticated adult activity involving, of course, sophisticated adults. Like in an old Hollywood movie. She would have to be Cary Grant because she clearly possesses a better sense of style that the perpetually denim’ed object of her desire. Regardless, she imagined everything would be just so: Neat, tidy arrangements. Cocktails and a charming kind of ennui. Then the realization sunk deeper: She is sleeping with a woman who drinks wine out of a coffee mug quite willingly, believes _Alien vs. Predator_ is a “great” movie, and has used a trash bag as a rain poncho (“only in emergency situations, and you’d be surprised how effective they are”).

But this is also the same woman who comes to her home and now, at this very moment, stands in Caroline’s bedroom and tells her that she looks great in such a sweetly adoring, gently desperate kind of way—as if she were a sailor returned from sea, yearning to rekindle a lover’s desire—that Caroline does sway a bit from this romantic assault. In fact, she comes dangerously close to swooning, which is not acceptable at all, and she would be greatly alarmed at that except for Gillian closing the gap between them, cradling her face in both hands, and kissing her like a house afire.

It’s all too much, the sweet warmth of her mouth and her tongue—creating some sort of lassitude that leaves her helpless but aroused, a drug blossoming in her blood. Breathless, Caroline breaks it off. “Wait.”

Puzzled and dazed, Gillian stops.

“Is the room too bright?” The room lacks the warm patina of wine, of scotch, of night, all those elements of that first time. She worries it won’t be as good as it was then. More importantly, she worries that daylight will accentuate every physical flaw she has—jowls, breasts, hips thickly eclipsed with sharp shade thrown from the merciless accuracy of daylight. 

Confused, Gillian squints, and then smiles uncertainly. “You’ve the curtains drawn.”

“I know, but still.”

“It’s fine.” She’s kissing Caroline’s neck, unbuttoning her blouse, sliding her hand between cotton and skin, the pads of her fingertips resting gently along the ridge of Caroline’s collarbone; she’s Miles Davis at repose before his trumpet, just before the all-out jam session rips. “You smell nice,” she murmurs.

But Caroline is not quite ready to be played, because her nerves are pitched boldly into a D minor kind of hysteria. So she blathers. “I think it’s the shampoo. Well, it’s William’s shampoo—well, I bought it for him but he doesn’t really use it anymore and it was so bloody expensive I thought it should be used. I also thought it didn’t have a scent but it does, at least I think it does. I don’t know how to describe it, though. It’s organic. Do I smell organic?”

Again Gillian pulls away, adds a sigh. “Really have my work cut out with you, don’t I?”

“Work? What work? This isn’t supposed to be _work._ ”

In response Gillian rolls her eyes and shoves Caroline with just the precise amount of gentle force, sending her toppling onto the bed. She sheds her coat, letting it drop onto the floor; the distinct sound of car keys tinkle from inside a pocket, softly muffled and reminding Caroline of sleigh bells heard at a distance in some far-off, inviolate white winter world—some manufactured, enticing holiday scenario that never quite happened and never quite relinquished its fantastical hold upon her. Gillian is not in as furious a frenzy as she was the first time and lowers herself onto Caroline with deliberate slowness, taking her time to position herself just so—hand gliding up Caroline’s thigh as a wool skirt pools darkly around her wrist like a sloughed-off skin, and positioning her own thigh between Caroline’s legs. Her hand navigates a narrow pass before retreating, fingers backsliding down the thigh, only to begin their dallying, playful ascent one more time.

It drives Caroline mad. Desperate, she seeks contact with skin, pulling up the edge of Gillian’s shirt and digging into the muscled, gently slanting plane that leads toward Gillian’s spine. She’s acutely aware of a scar in that vicinity, thick and hard and gleaming as the pearl handle of a prized knife. She encountered it the first time they slept together, in a gently traced acknowledgment before she moved on to charting the rest of Gillian’s body with her hands, her mouth, her breath. She did not have to ask who authored the scar; it was a further mark of trust between them that nothing need be said about it, and somehow their collaborative silence revised the story of its existence.

She’s too lost in reverie over the bitter beauty of that scar and in containing the sudden urge to kiss it—which would upset the apple cart of this pleasing position—and also in the sensation of Gillian touching her and kissing and sucking at her neck—hickeys be damned—to pay heed to the strange, mournful sound floating up from the floor. Her incendiary thoughts lay waste to common sense. Let the world, at least her boring version of it, go up in flames. But the sound persists, hovers on the edge of awareness: A low and lonesome electronic moo, a singing cow with a manic vibrato. It’s Gillian’s cell. 

But Gillian hears it, and lifts her head. “Shit.”

“What?” Caroline mutters, still adrift in a sexual haze.

“Oh, shit.” With one spastic lunge she’s off Caroline and hanging over the bed, and the only thing that keeps her from belly-flopping onto the floor as she digs around in a coat pocket for her phone is Caroline’s iron grip on the waistband of her jeans. In this somewhat acrobatic position, which momentarily gives Caroline several illicit ideas, she answers the phone.

“Hey. Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m on my way. Yeah, fifteen minutes. Sorry.” A pause. “I’ll be there.” She rings off.

Caroline hauls her back onto the bed, wincing as Gillian, a slender deadweight, sits disconsolately on her thighs. “What?”

“I have to go—shit, I’m sorry.” Gillian runs a hand through her hair. “I’m covering for someone at work. I nearly forgot.”

“Nearly?”

“Yeah, all right, I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“But—”

“I’m sorry,” Gillian repeats it. She stares at her hands. It’s the mantra of the abused, of the child who takes blame even when it’s not his fault. In this instance it is her fault, but she shores up mindless repetitive apologies as a barricade against the sad anticipation of the relentless shit that she believes will always be flung her way.

“Stop saying that,” Caroline says. As if rousing herself from some Technicolor erotic daydream—she’s back in black-and-white Kansas without Toto and the devoted scarecrow has somehow morphed into her moping stepsister—she rubs her face, vigorously shakes her head. “It’s all right.”

Gillian only continues to stare at her hands.

“Really. It’s okay.” She touches Gillian’s arm, fingers wriggling almost playfully up a shirtsleeve, sweeping over warm skin and baby soft down.

And then Gillian looks at her as if she’s never encountered kindness before; she is so accustomed to her designated role as a perpetual source of trouble and disappointment to everyone, even her beloved father, that the smallest gesture takes on the greatest significance. “Really?” she whispers.

Which makes Caroline all the more determined to eradicate any lingering doubt. “Yeah.” Her touch drifts down Gillian’s arm.

“You’re really wonderful,” Gillian blurts.

Oh Christ, shut it down, Caroline thinks. But she shivers; her chest tightens. “You’re going to be late.”

“You’re right—oh, shit.” Gillian bounces off her like a trampoline—not before awkwardly elbowing Caroline in the small intestine—and dashes into the bathroom. “I mean, it’s kind of hilarious,” Gillian is saying, voice echoing loudly from the bathroom, “ironic I guess, when I think about it. Maybe you’ll think it’s funny.”

“Probably not.” Caroline stares at the ceiling while the reality of a sex-free afternoon sinks in. Her blouse flaps open like a wound, her stockings are a wreck, her dirty heels are digging into the bedspread, and her panties are damp. She’s half-dressed and completely fucked, but not in a way she’d like to be.

Water roars and rushes from the bathroom sink. What the hell is she doing in there? Caroline wonders.

“What?” Gillian shouts over the running water.

“Just tell me your stupid bloody story, all right?” Caroline shouts back.

“I’m covering for this bloke Fred, see.” She turns off the faucet. “Anyway—the reason I’m taking his shift is because he’s having it off with his mate’s wife.”

“And thus nobly self-sacrificing your own mucky affair with your stepsister in the process. Go you.”

“We’re not stepsisters yet. I think.” Stubbornly, Gillian clings to the belief that their parents’ quickie marriage “didn’t count.” 

Caroline indulges her. “Only a matter of time. But really—is that part of it? Part of the attraction?” Of course, she thinks, and chastises herself for not thinking of it sooner. Eager to psychoanalyze, Caroline sits up. “The lure of the forbidden? Breaking a taboo?”

“Nope.” Gillian wanders back into the bedroom while vigorously drying her hands with a hand towel. “It’s your tits.” She throws the towel, easily achieving her objective: Hitting Caroline squarely in the face with it.

Surprised that her irritation only hits a middling level, Caroline tosses the towel on the floor. “I thought it was my legs.”

“Can’t decide, really.” Gillian retrieves her coat from the floor but doesn’t put it on. Instead she looks at Caroline in her patented, unnervingly intense way, as if she is actively and accurately figuring Caroline out and committing everything she sees to a indelible, flawless representation of a deeply flawed person, all stored within the banked corridors of her mind like a rare painting in the depths of a museum vault. “Can we try this again? Later in the week?”

Defensive at being so scrutinized, Caroline draws her legs up, hugs her knees to her chest. “I don’t know. Maybe this is a sign.”

Gillian moves closer—Caroline is now eye level with her jean-clad thigh and her restlessly beautiful hand, fingers itchy as a gunslinger’s—and says, “Yeah, it’s a sign that I’m a fucking knob who can’t remember anything.”

Caroline is uncharitable, largely due to the damp throbbing between her legs. “Yes, well. A fucking beautiful knob, anyway.”

Gillian leans down. Gently she tilts Caroline’s head toward her own and kisses her—it’s slow, wet, tender, as natural as breathing, as exhilarating as the part of the dream where one drops off the cliff of consciousness into the cradle of the nocturnal abyss, danger and safety twined together. Instinctually Caroline’s hand flies up, her fingers sink into Gillian’s hair, nails digging into her scalp. She likes that Gillian can take bits of roughness; it’s vastly different from those times with Kate, where half the time she feared her own instincts and desires, worried that whatever delicate balance existed between them would be thrown into irretrievable disarray by her frustratingly constant, risk-averse need for control. Why this issue receded into the background with Gillian, she did not know. Perhaps because she has convinced herself that what they are doing and what they are at this particular moment does not matter, that she has nothing to lose, that when they stop doing this everything will once again revert to normal: Black and white Kansas.

Reaching the coda of the kiss, Gillian gently nibbles at her lower lip. “I think that’s a better sign, don’t you?” she says.

After catching her breath, Caroline finally says, “You don’t play fair.”

“Why should I?”

“I suppose that’s a relevant point. All right, go. I’ll call you later.”

Gillian grins. “Good.”

“But I don’t know what I’m going to do now for the rest of the day.”

“An afternoon to yourself and nothing planned? Shit, I feel really sorry for you.”

Caroline glares.

“Make a lasagna.” Gillian jangles her car keys.

“What?”

“You said the other day William loves lasagna. Surprise him.” Gillian pauses at the door and zigzags a finger at her. “But maybe pull yourself together a bit, so you don’t look so slaggy.” She’s galloping down the stairs before Caroline even thinks to throw something heavy at her.

Later, she makes the lasagna. William loves it.


	2. the one-handed sonata

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You guys, I hope you've seen the Godfather movies. Really. Otherwise, sorry.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone who hears Toto’s “Africa” twice within the span of an hour is in dire need of alcohol. For such exposure could trigger a profound cyclic rage in the most patient and compassionate of human beings. Particularly in a loud restaurant that specializes in overpriced chicken and overcooked vegetables, in which case the likelihood of a berserker episode increases perhaps tenfold, depending on such variables as gender, age, race, and ethnic background.

Caroline makes up this statistic while finishing off her wine, amid the plaintive wail: _gonna take the time to do the things we never had, oooh._

The obligatory, congratulatory family dinner meanders on over coffee and dessert; ostensibly the “congratulatory” part concerns the impending wedding of her mother and Gillian’s father, but for Caroline it is more a matter of congratulating herself for not drinking too much, not ripping anyone’s head off, and not looking too much at Gillian because a scant two hours ago she was, at last, getting properly fucked in Gillian’s bed, face pressed into a musty comforter, teeth tearing at the aged cloth as she came. She is not certain why it was so intense and amazing this time, especially since they were once again half-dressed and pressed for time. Maybe it was the position, maybe her hormones furiously combusted in a spectacular fashion like a sexual supernova, maybe because a sheep blessed the event by eyeing her intently as she, overcoat flaring defiantly, skulked into the farmhouse like a field marshal entering a brothel, or the way Gillian crooned _God, I love fucking you_ at just the right moment while taking her in such a slow focused way, as if she were performing a sonata with one hand.

Yes—that last bit, that’s the one. No wonder sirloin tips with a chickpea salad pale in comparison.

Afterward she lay breathing bullishly into the comforter, clinging to a pillow as if she were a shipwreck survivor held aloft by driftwood, dimly aware of Gillian stroking her hair and murmuring, “Not such a control freak now are you, sweetheart?” Even though the particulars of their grand romance usually consisted of calling one another _twat_ and _knob,_ Caroline did not panic at this surprisingly gentle endearment, which hinted troublingly at emotional depth and genuine attachment. She drifted toward sleep while blocking out those niggling thoughts of Gillian’s previous paramours writhing about on the tatty comforter; once again Kate’s bothersome fondness for Prince resurfaced in her mind as she thought of that lyric from “Little Red Corvette” about jockeys and horses running free, and she would have really fallen asleep save for Gillian rambling about _The Godfather._ Now speaking of weddings, Gillian said (although they hadn’t been speaking, let alone of weddings, at all) that film opened with a famous wedding scene—she attempted to liken it to their current situation, but the analogies and correlations to their complex family structure did not quite pan out to her liking, even though Caroline was “obviously Michael Corleone,” but Gillian couldn’t decide if she were Sonny or Fredo—Sonny was the impulsive, temperamental one, Fredo the useless ineffective one, _and I guess I’m a bit of both,_ she concluded.

 Caroline did not remember much of anything about the film, except for how she worried that the severed horse head was actually real and how pretty Michael’s Sicilian bride was and how someone as pasty white as Diane Keaton could carry off wearing orange-toned clothing. She could not see how she was “obviously” the brooding young godfather, but assumed it a compliment of sorts. Better him than the bloke with the horse head in his bed.

She rolled over and looked up at Gillian, who sat leaning against the bed’s headboard, blouse off, bra on, jeans on, restlessly wriggling her bare feet, her gaze idle and curious upon a slab of sunlight suspended in the windowpane—the opaque gold ensnaring the moment, like the thickening amber that trapped hapless prehistoric insects eons ago, but the gold in the glass seemed all the more wondrous due to its impermanence. She pressed the palm of her hand against Gillian’s ribs and held her own breath with reverent pleasure at witnessing its intended effect on Gillian—the lazy flutter of her eyelids, the secretive smile just as she released an imperceptible wisp of a sigh.

Caroline slid her hand down the warm belly, and popped open the button of her jeans. “Which one was the sexy one?”

Gillian squirmed. “Oh. Sonny. Definitely. Sexy beast.”

“Okay.” She unzipped the jeans. “You’re Sonny.”

“Well, he gets killed in a pretty fantastic way. It’s like a blood ballet.”

Caroline kissed her at the border of jeans and skin, hooked a finger over the edge of the underwear, despaired as Gillian took another breath intended to fuel speech.  

“Actually.” Gillian frowned. “I guess everybody gets killed. Everybody dies eventually. Like _Hamlet._ Or the opera.”

Playfully Caroline tapped her belly. “Does Sonny get killed by a woman who tries to go down on him while he’s rambling about a forty-year-old gangster movie?”

And then once again the phone mooed plaintively at an inopportune moment. This time a frantic call from Alan—the cadence and thickness of his accent reduced to tinny digital chastising—informing his chronically tardy daughter not to be late for the dinner, and here Caroline marveled at how quickly Gillian went from relaxed and thoughtful to sullen and scowling: Head tilted upward in a martyr’s pose— _forgive my father, he knows not what he does_ —jaw set in a hard, dangerous way as she clamps down on the cud of resentment.

Impulsively Caroline kissed her cheek, aimed lower to kiss her jawline. And then almost regretted it when Gillian looked at her in such a startled and raw manner, the look of a woman whose need is slowly edging toward and helplessly bleeding over into love. Or so Caroline thought; she was painfully familiar with the capricious descent into feeling something one was not supposed to feel. Love, an unpredictable artist, always begins as a sloppily eager apprentice: Before committing a single drop of paint to her masterpiece, she’s told to make sketches and studies first. She doesn’t. She’s given plaster casts to draw. She breaks them. She stretches out her canvases all wrong and warps them terribly. She constantly repositions the life models and then exaggerates their physical flaws to such an extent that they quit in a huff. Her watercolor brush, fat with translucent paint, impulsively touches down and a wild conflagration of color runs amok over the paper, immolating the whiteness, consuming the vision, overwhelming all with its unintended, chaotic beauty.  

Gillian cupped her cheek and leaned to return the kiss, but at the last moment Caroline looked down and mumbled something about checking her phone before bolting out of the bed. Indeed, Celia had left a series of phone messages charting her brief but apparently noteworthy journey across the drab Yorkshire tundra:

_1\. Where the eff are you?_

_2\. Fine. We’re leaving without you. I hope whatever you’re doing is important._

_3\. Everyone fits into the convertible. It’s rather amazing. Lawrence, you cannot drive so stop asking!_

_4\. We might be late. There’s a lot of bloody traffic. Where do all these people come from?_

_5\. This restaurant is a bit tatty. Did Gillian pick it? Is she still at work, do you know? That girl will be late to her own funeral, Alan says. Of course, you’re late too. That’s not like you. Are you all right? Or are you just doing this to upset me? That would be so like you. _

_6\. Darling I forget—are you a vegetarian now too? I don’t want to be stereotypical, but—they have vegetarian things on the menu. Stuffed squid? Oh wait, that’s stuffed squash. But really, where the eff are you?_

 

They stagger departure times to arrive separately, and hopefully inauspiciously, at the restaurant. To ensure that Gillian and Raff—who gets picked up at his girlfriend’s place by his mother—arrive first, she sits at a petrol station for at least twenty minutes eating a bag of crisps. Nothing else could blunt and befoul the glittering edge of ecstasy quite like the combination of gas and grease and the almost empty road spiraling out into the torpor of the winter horizon.

Upon arrival at the restaurant Caroline is acutely aware that she is not only gloriously late, but also that her underwear is stuffed in her purse—crossly Gillian had thrown it at her head while they frantically dressed and snarled, _Christ, you think I want a souvenir or something?_ She discovers that the seat saved for her is at the head of the longish, almost banquet-style table. Warily she pauses, imagines some invisible mantle descending upon her head. Headmistress, head bitch, head of the bloody universe. No wonder sexual surrender is so vastly appealing. Everyone takes note of this hesitation with various notes of amused surprise except for her mother, who flashes her _dear God in heaven why are you embarrassing me?_ look, and Gillian, sitting near the opposite end of the table, who only looks wryly secretive as she drains a wine glass.

It all fits. It all makes sense now. Caroline thinks, Oh God, I am really the Godfather. The one everyone relies on to do the dirty work, to fix things. The one who dies alone, morally bankrupt, and estranged from his wife, his children. What will be asked of me? Will I have to go to Cuba and give someone the kiss of death? (Unfortunately Gillian had recounted not only the plot of the first _Godfather_ film, but also the second. Obviously the third one did not merit postcoital discussion.)

Later she picks at her food, surreptitiously and jealously watches Gillian charm her sons, and listens to Alan spinning a tale involving his recently deceased friend Maurice, a wheelbarrow, several bottles of whiskey, and a lady police officer. She’s lost track of the story but knows when to nod, laugh, and look amused. After so many years as a teacher of entitled young arseholes and as a wife to a terminal narcissist, she knows how to play the part of audience member when the situation calls for it, even when she is a million miles away. As she is now. She wishes profusely that it were easy to convince herself that her motivation in continuing this thing with Gillian is driven purely by curiosity; merely proclaiming _we were drunk_ was a get-out-of-jail-free card that covered any number of transgressions. So she tackles it from a scientific standpoint: Would subsequent results under such varying factors as environment, emotional stresses, the tightness of Gillian’s jeans, and fluctuating states of both sobriety and hormones be as uniformly satisfying and pleasing as the first time? What would the data reveal? Given that today she had one of the most fantastic orgasms in recent memory while stone cold sober and on a really ugly synthetic comforter and that Gillian was wearing an unflattering blouse that looked like a begonia had thrown up on a Jackson Pollock painting, and which she had raked off Gillian’s body at the first opportunity, Caroline can only conclude, with equal parts misery and euphoria, that further tests are desperately required.

As Alan winds up the story—not surprisingly, Maurice ended up having it off with the lady police officer—she attempts corralling errant chickpeas on her plate with the intent of stacking them in a pyramid like cannonballs.

“You know,” Celia announces, “I’ve a sudden urge for a glass of port.”

“Shall I get you—” Alan starts to rise.

“No, dear.” Celia reaches across the table and pats his arm. “I’ll go. Caroline will come with me.” Celia shoots her a rather pointed look; the old Godfather wishes to confer with the new one.

Contrary to the bitter end, Caroline says, “I’m not done eating.”

“Yes, you are. Stop trying to build them into a pyramid. You used to do that with your peas as a child.”

“Very enterprising,” Alan says brightly—anything to defuse the obvious tension between mother and daughter.

“Come on.” Celia stands. “I know you want another glass of wine.”

At the bar Caroline is indeed about to order another glass of wine when Celia shoots her down: “Haven’t you had enough? You’re driving.”

“After a lifetime of attempts at decoding your mixed messages, it’s a wonder I’m not in a mental hospital.”  She orders mineral water; disapprovingly, the balding bartender frowns at her as he steers a glass of port at Celia. “All right. What is it you want to talk about?”

“Two things, actually.” Celia sips her port. “Small matters first. Do you know who Gillian is mucking about with?”

Caroline is grateful for (1) not spewing Perrier all over her mother, and (2) not inhaling Perrier while hyperventilating like a racehorse on uppers.  Instead she fixes her face into its most neutral, bored expression, mixing in a bit of casual surprise as emotional seasoning. “Gillian is mucking about?” she echoes.

“Alan thinks so. She’s been acting, well, furtive.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“He says she gets that way sometimes when she’s—oh, I don’t know how to put it. In heat?”

“She’s not an alley cat, Mum.” Caroline says it more sharply than intended.

“Surely she’s said something to you?”

An elaborate shrug.

“She talks to you. She looks up to you, I think. You’re practically biffs now.”

“What?” Caroline bites down on a piece of ice that sends seismic shock waves of cold agony through a metallic filling in some reclusive back molar. It’s a necessary, wholeheartedly welcome distraction.

“Biffs,” Celia repeats.

Was _biff_ the latest internet slang—for “bisexual fuck friend,” perhaps? Caroline casts what she hopes is a clandestine look at her (only, and favorite) bisexual fuck friend, who is currently looking interested in something William is saying. Did her mother somehow _know_? Was this all an elaborate setup, a tried-and-true interrogation method as seen in endless police procedurals on TV, with the aim of extracting a tearful confession? _Caroline, we know someone is having it off with that surly bitch. We just need your help in finding out who. Can you do that, Caroline? Can you help us? We’d be ever so grateful. Oh, by the way, we’ve noticed you keep leaving work a little early these days. Is that, er, normal for you? Oh and here…I have a receipt for a black lace bra you purchased recently. Can you tell me why you bought this?_  Here she stands, a grown woman with a career and children of her own who lives in bottomless fear that, like the Road Runner, her mother will always be one tantalizing step ahead of her.

“You know what I mean,” Celia says exasperatedly. “‘Best Friends Forever’ or whatever it stands for: BFF. Is that right?”

“Oh.” Caroline deflates in relief. “That. You just say the initials: Bee. Eff. Eff.”

Celia throws up her hands. “Why must everything be so complicated?” she cries.

Caroline shrugs again and swigs fizzy water as if it were vodka straight, wonders if she’s going through menopause because her skin prickles with unaccountable heat. Perhaps the supernova orgasm of a few hours ago was her ovaries commencing a farewell tour. That would be her luck. “Look, we are not BFFs. And no, she hasn’t said anything about seeing anyone. _And_ if she is, well, who cares? Let her have it off and get it out of her system. That’s usually what she does anyway, isn’t it?” So far, so true, even though her voice escalates as she goes deeper and deeper, spelunking into the lie of careful omission. She would go to the bathroom to pull herself together save for the fear that Gillian will follow her there and attempt to initiate making out in a bathroom stall; given that Gillian has already proposed that they shag in her decrepit dirty truck, the possibility seems less remote than one would imagine.

Celia sighs. “I suppose so. But Alan is concerned if she gets involved with some _idiot_ she might be tempted to bring him to the wedding.”

“Both of you should try giving her the benefit of the doubt. She’s impulsive, not stupid. I really don’t think she would bring some casual—fling to a wedding.”

“You mean an eff buddy,” Celia murmurs sotto voce.

You mean me, she thinks. “I really need to keep you offline.”

“I know what a MILF is too. Hence my confusion on all these damned acronyms. They pronounce MILF _as if it were an actual word,_ but they spell out BFF? It’s inconsistent! There is no logic, no thought at work!”

“Rage against the machine, Mother.”

“One of Lawrence’s little friends calls you a MILF. Did you know?” Celia says with gleeful mischief.

Caroline is not surprised; teenaged boys are such a bundle of hormones that most would find a wooden post with a hole attractive. “Which one?”

“The one with the spots and the untucked shirt and the bad haircut.”

“That’s all of them, essentially.”

Celia waves dismissively. “Enough of that. The second matter I wanted to discuss—”

“You and Alan are opening a sex club for the geriatric crowd?”

“Always a smart mouth, even when sober.”

“You should be proud.”

“I am, despite what you think.” Celia smiles.

Her mother is always generous in victory. Ever since learning that things were over with Kate, Celia has been irritatingly solicitous, doling out compliments and affection like a repentant Scrooge _._

“Well.” Celia punctuates this by sitting her empty glass down on the bar rather loudly. “Here it is. We want to go to London.”

“For the honeymoon?”

“No, now. Before we get married. Perhaps next weekend.”

Caroline can feel her face crumple into disapproval. “Why?”

“Carpe diem, love.”

“What?”

“Put that Oxford education to good use, Caroline.”

“I know what the phrase means. But—explain, please. You’ll be going on a honeymoon, presumably. Why the rush for another trip beforehand?”

“He nearly died.” Uncharacteristically inelegant, Celia blurts it out. “That’s why.” Her hand trembles, wavers; wizened branches caught in a whirlwind of time. “Every minute we have together—I want all of it to count for something wonderful. And so does he.”

“Does London in the winter count as something wonderful?” Caroline asks. Her mother pulls her _don’t be a smartass_ face. “It’s just rhetorical.” The principal problem with being the Godfather is that it is both tiresome and tiring to be the Godfather. Sometimes one just does not have the energy to crush lives, hopes, and dreams; sometimes, one is unexpectedly moved by the plaintive wishes of one’s mother. She sighs. “How long are we talking about here?”

“Just a long weekend. That’s all, really. We’ll be back before you even notice we’re gone. And we’re staying in a very good hotel, in Bloomsbury, near a hospital in case anything happens, God forbid. William found it and booked it for us.”

“Great. Using my son as a travel agent.”

“He was quite willing and happy to do so. So go on, present your laundry list of complaints and arguments against it. I know how you are. Frankly, I was surprised when you didn’t become a solicitor.”

“I have no objections—well, nothing that counts for much. Just my usual sense of dread and paranoia.”

“I blame your father for that.”

“You’re just going to do what you want anyway, so—go. Have fun. Just be careful, don’t lose your bloody head.”

Celia is surprised—and suspicious. “I was expecting more of a fight out of you.”

“I’ve learned to pick my battles.” Caroline leans heavily against the bar.

“Good, dear, good. Then that means, I hope, that I can ask you a favor—that you will help me with the real obstacle to this trip.”

“Which is?”

She follows the direction of Celia’s slight nod toward the table. Toward Gillian, who has run out of charm and now sits in brooding isolation at the table; the boys chat animatedly with Alan. Bored, she begins to make short work of a barely eaten chocolate cake on Raff’s plate.

Oh, Fredo. “Oh, shit.” Caroline sighs guiltily. Gillian had spoken quite movingly of poor Fredo’s poetic demise, executed in a fishing boat out on glassy Lake Tahoe. Perhaps Gillian is Fredo, the sweet perpetual fuckup, perhaps she identifies with him more than she is willing to admit.

Betraying her nervousness, Celia taps the empty glass against the bar; the bartender interprets this as a call for another round, but she shakes him off. “Precisely. She will have a fit. She _still_ thinks it’s too soon for him to go anywhere. And she will upset her father to no end because of it. I know he won’t go unless she’s on board.”

“I thought they were fighting. So what does it matter what Gillian thinks?”

Celia rolls her eyes. “You know that means nothing. They’re joined at the hip. He won’t risk that kind of disapproval from her.”  

“Fine. But what do you expect _me_ to do?” Caroline says peevishly.

“Can you keep her drunk for perhaps 72 hours?” While Celia says it humorously, there is a strangely disturbing note of hopefulness in the request.

“Be serious.”

“All right. I expect that if she talks to you about this—and I’m certain she will—you will be persuasive and reassuring and talk her down from the ledge. Make her see that it _will_ be all right.”

It’d help if I can get her pants off this time, Caroline thinks. She signals the bartender and, despite the flatlining of Celia’s disapproving mouth, orders a glass of red. What the hell, she thinks. William can drive her home.

“Does that sound reasonable?” Celia asks.

Caroline knocks back half the glass in one long sweet gulp. “Sure. I’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse.”

Celia smiles obliviously. “You know, I have no idea what that means, but I rather like the way it sounds.”

 


	3. the madonna and the odalisque, the saint and the fool

The next time Caroline is at the farmhouse, the fates have cruelly conspired to downgrade her status from sordid shag buddy to mere babysitter. It’s her own bloody fault, but no matter. She’s slumped into the couch with Gillian’s granddaughter, the infamously nicknamed Calamity Jane, perched on her knee. The telly plays on loudly and Gillian bangs around in the kitchen; it sounds as if she’s building a tower from pots and pans.

Caroline is engaged in a stare-down with Calamity Jane, except for the fact that Calamity is blissfully aware that any kind of contest is involved and instead smiles while blowing spit bubbles at her. “You’re lucky you’re so cute,” she informs the baby. “Because you rather messed up my plans.”

“She is cute,” Gillian shouts too loudly from the kitchen. “She looks like me.”

“Except for the sheen of drool covering her face.”

“You’ve never seen me eat pizza.”

“And now I hope I never do.”

“Seriously, did you _not_ get my last message?” The message, which Caroline would not receive until she reached her current destination, read _got to bloody babysit so dont come over unless you want to watch cartoons._

“I turned off the phone. I was in a meeting and couldn’t be bothered with your puerile attempts at sexting.” The meeting involved suits from the Standards and Testing Agency. PowerPoint presentations were involved, always an indication of pompous form dwarfing minuscule content. She sat in the front row, working her legs to their best advantage because she knew one of the suits had a thing for her and that the lethal combination of her best asset and her infuriating indifference would undo him to such an extent that she and her colleagues could poke massive holes through whatever half-assed proposals or guidelines the Agency hoped to implement. She also didn’t want to risk looking at Kate, who was also present at the meeting but seated in the back, discreetly near the door, perhaps so she could run to the bathroom at the slightest warning from her pregnancy-addled bladder. Caroline tried, and failed miserably, not to be alternately churlish and concerned about Kate’s condition. Tried, and failed miserably, not to still be stupid in love with her. As of late the only thing she has succeeded at rather brilliantly was avoidance of everything in general and Kate specifically: At the slightest hint of Kate’s presence in a hallway, glimpsed at or heard from a distance, she would leap into an empty classroom, a janitorial closet, and occasionally the offices of startled colleagues as if she were a superhero with dementia.  But for the moment, at the meeting, she thought her head would explode if she continued to get Gillian’s texts while Kate’s imagined glare burned a hole through the back of her skull:

_What are you wearing?_ was Gillian’s lame opening.

Caroline had rolled her eyes while typing: _A burka and a burlap sack_.

_fuck off twat_ came the reply.

Caroline chose to interpret this as _you are breathtakingly gorgeous and I cannot wait to take you._ She replied: _Can’t do this. In a meeting about literacy levels. Apropos, because I worry about your literacy levels._

Should have known better than to poke the bear:

_i worry next time i fuck you im going to break my wrist because thats what nearly happened last time old girl_

At that point—receiving serious stink eye from Michael Bloody Dobson—she turned off the phone. It would not do, she thought, to be a fortysomething woman blushing and smirking over a shag.

Thus Caroline was surprised when, after the meeting, she raced over to the farmhouse to find Gillian not alone but posing as a madonna of the Yorkshire plains with a baby on her hip, both of them smiling in a similarly sheepish, adorable fashion. For one gloriously disturbing moment her throat thickened with a thousand unsaid things and she found the sight of Gillian with a child impossibly beautiful; she wondered how much of that had to do with seeing Kate at the meeting, of all those lost possibilities beating back to her like some sort of phantom, revived heart.

Now she sprawls on the couch with Calamity, gently bouncing the baby on her knee and recalling the last time she was on this particular piece of furniture: The night Gillian confessed about Eddie. How drunk they were, how relaxed and nearly happy she had felt, happy for the first time in weeks. How Gillian loomed over her like a boozy angel, all serious and lovely, how sepia shadows glossed thickly around her, throwing into heightened contrast the bright troubled blue of her eyes and the sensual red of her mouth; for that moment she seemed as if she had been sliced out of a renaissance painting by a wanton art thief too smitten to see the beauty of the whole. How she waited and wanted something to happen—except what actually did. She had wanted nothing more than to taste Gillian’s mouth; instead, she got a murder confession and a conversation difficult enough to navigate while sober, let alone pissed.

Gillian pads into the room, scratching her head and looking as if she’d just rolled out of bed instead of doing God knows what to sheep all day. “Sure you don’t want me to put the kettle on?”

“Your tea sucks,” Caroline proclaims—churlishness remaining the dominant theme of the day, particularly since sex seems to be off the table now.

“God, you’re in a mood.” Gillian squints at her. “Did you not solve the great literacy crisis of England or whatever?” She swoops up Calamity in such a joyous fashion that the baby squeals with delight. “C’mon, Calam, I’m rescuing you from the mean old headmistress.” Gillian smiles brilliantly and adoringly at the child in a way that Caroline has not seen her smile at anyone. Oh, to be on the receiving end of that look, that beam of love, she thinks—and then quickly snuffs out this tender flame of a thought before it becomes a wildfire. She has enough problems with the fire down below.

Calamity is parked into a high chair facing the universal babysitter, the telly, which churns out a cartoon involving the adventures of a carrot, a hedgehog, and a cabbage and makes Caroline yearn for the days of obsequiously gay bunny rabbits in various states of drag enacting operas and film noirs with gun-crazy bald men and lisping ducks. For a disturbingly long moment Gillian studies the screen intently, as if she were attempting to dissect the profound mysticism of an Andre Tarkovsky film and not watching a cartoon cabbage with legs outrun a carrot and a hedgehog.

“The cabbage always wins,” Gillian says. “Seriously. I just don’t get that. What does it mean?” She looks to Caroline for interpretation.

Caroline slouches deeper into the couch. “An artistic mystery for the bloody ages.”

“Like _Alien vs. Predator_. Art for the masses but misunderstood by overeducated Oxford bitches.”

Caroline sighs dramatically. “Here we go again. I swear to Christ if you ever say the words _alien_ or _predator_ to me again, I shall scream.”

Gillian struts over to the couch. “So I reckon saying _versus_ is still on the table?” She straddles Caroline, the heels of her hands pressing hard into Caroline’s shoulders and holding her with the same seemingly effortless power achieved through those lingering, intense gazes—that steely look that always pins her as helplessly as a goddamned butterfly in a box, Caroline thinks. Once again she is intoxicated by Gillian’s scent, clean and sharp like a forest glade, or what she imagines a forest glade smells like. She has tried in vain to recall any significant childhood trips to a park or a nature preserve that might explain this. Lately her restless mind has sprinted through corridors of memory trying to find some revelatory scrap; she feels a bit like Charlie in _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—_ a favorite book from childhood _—_ in search of the golden ticket that would grant her access to the mysterious and pleasure-filled world where all her needs and desires would be sated and assuaged, and all the answers to all her questions would be found.

Gillian caresses her neck. “Right then,” she says. “Let’s talk about another under-appreciated classic: _Trailer Trash vs. Snotty Bitch_.” An attempted kiss is rebuffed when Caroline claps a hand over her face, unfortunately reminding herself of those terrible little face-hugging baby monsters in the _Alien_ films that her sons delighted in but gave her both the shits and unnerving nightmares for days afterwards.

 “Just what do you think you’re doing?” Caroline demands.

Like a cat with a paper bag on her head, Gillian rears back and shakes off the oppressive hand. “You can cut the head bitch tone now. What d’you think I’m doing?”

 “You think I’m going to shag you in front of a baby?” Caroline says incredulously.

“No, of course not. But I just thought we could—you know, make out a little bit?” She begins to unbutton Caroline’s blouse with such dexterous speed that Caroline thinks that if there were a finishing school for lesbians, Gillian should teach Undressing 101; she has also mastered the bra quite well too, perhaps there could be a separate course listing for that. She grins with toothy, unabashed delight at what she encounters: a black lace bra. “Here now—Christmas has come early.” She traces décolletage with a rough fingertip.

Gently Caroline seizes her wrist. “No unwrapping gifts just yet.”

 “Oh, come on.” Gillian shakes her off and looks quickly at Calamity, who has established some sort of running preverbal commentary with the cartoon. “She’s just a baby. She’s not even looking at us. Can’t remember anything at this point. Don’t even know her own name.”

 “That’s because you idiots keep calling her Calamity Jane. She’s going to end up in therapy—well, with your family, that’s probably a given—”

“See that I need to remind you who your mother is.”

“—but I don’t want to contribute to any psychic mess that may come from her witnessing her _grandmother’_ s sexual shenanigans.”

Gillian sneers. “There is no ‘psychic mess’—you’re so fu—ridiculous, you’re just so ridiculous. Be honest, do you really remember anything from when you were that young?”

“No, but it could have happened,” Caroline retorts. “Maybe that’s why I’m the way I am: A middle-aged fuckup—”

“Stop.” Gillian thrusts a chastising finger in her face. “No swearing in front of Calamity. Promised my dad I would not swear in front of her, so we have to behave. For some reason I seem to swear _a lot_ when you’re around.”

“You just called me a bitch not a minute ago!”

“Well, _bitch_ is a technical term too and let’s face it, you are a bitch, technically and otherwise.”

“I am not in the mood for your crazy justifications. I mean, really, are you telling me _I’m_ responsible for all your bad behavior and troubles now, eh? I make you swear, I get you drunk so you sleep with me, I nearly break your wrist, now I’m seducing you with sexy lingerie.” 

Gillian pretends to mull this over with the utmost seriousness. “That all seems fairly accurate.”

“Well, piss off, I made no such agreement with your father and anyway, to conclude my thought I’m a middle-aged _knob_ —is that any better?—having it off with the last person in the world I should be having it off with!”

 “Fine,” Gillian groans. “Maybe I’ll just make bloody fucking tea anyway—shit, see what you made do, I’m swearing again! It _is_ your fault!”

“Oh bollocks. You think it’s worse to swear in front of an infant than to fornicate in front of her?”

“Who said anything about _fornication,_ Mother Bloody Teresa? I just wanted to snog and feel you up. But fine, we’ll have it your way, we’ll just sit around and watch cartoons platonically.”

 “You might want to take your hands off my tits when you make these platonic declarations.”

 Both stare at the incriminating pair of hands splayed over Caroline’s chest.  

Gillian sighs melodramatically and decamps to the other end of the couch, where she sits folded into herself, knees drawn up to her chin. “All right then, Mrs. Elliot,” Gillian says in her best BBC announcer voice, “do tell me about your day. How are the youth of England? Have you been jumping into any broom closets lately?”

She regrets confessing her manic attempts at avoiding Kate and offers her most deadly glare, which, unfortunately, has always proven surprisingly ineffectual with Gillian.

“Oh wait, that’s right. I’m violating your laundry list of rules.” Gillian stretches and sinks into the sofa. She nudges Caroline’s thigh with both feet and Caroline tries to ignore the prodding of her pointy toes and the dirty grayish white socks she wears even though the right sock sports a tonsure that reveals a dome-like surface of the big toe, and even as every sentence of the following recitative is punctuated with an irritating poke: “Don’t talk about Kate—oh, except when _you_ want to. Don’t talk about John—unless he’s pissed _you_ off again somehow. No hickeys, no eating in bed, no excessive drinking—well, not anymore. No compliments. No ‘fornication’ in the front of the baby. Only problem is, we’re on my patch now, so I’m going to do what the bloody hell I want.”

“Swearing,” Caroline mocks in a falsetto.

Gillian covers her face with both hands and groans her surrender. “Hopeless.”

This brings the bickering to a merciful halt, if only for the time being. Caroline gently pinches Gillian’s semi-naked big toe, and gives in to curiosity. “Is John still calling you?”

“He calls. I don’t answer.” Gillian kicks at her again, soft, childish blows—designed for irritation and not pain, and Caroline realizes that Calamity is not the only baby she’s minding today. “Thought it might be awkward to tell him I’m shagging his wife—or is it ex-wife now?”

“Details, details, as you would say.” Caroline pushes ineffectually at an attacking foot.

“You worried about that?”

Caroline shrugs. “Worry? What me, worry?”

“I’m not going to lie to you. I seem incapable of that.” Gillian attempts to lodge her foot between Caroline’s ass and the couch.

“So you’ve told me. Will you stop doing that?” She seizes Gillian’s ankle. Even through the bulky sheath of the sock, tendons flow furiously under her touch. “So.”

“Yes, Mrs. Elliot?”

“Stop calling me that, you twat. We’re not going to do any weird roleplaying.”

“You’re no fun.” Gillian’s smile fades. “All right. What is it?”

“You really aren’t—sleeping with anyone else? Just me?” She presses her thumb into the arch of Gillian’s foot, is startled when Gillian releases a deep, throaty moan, the kind of moan she usually makes deep into foreplay. Caroline panics that the noise will snare Calamity Jane’s attention, but thankfully the adventures of the cabbage are far more absorbing—that, and the baby is enthusiastically pounding a toy against the tray of the high chair.

“Just you.” Gillian calibrates from a moan to a deep sigh as her foot is massaged, but maintains a wary gaze on Caroline. “You’re a little possessive,” she observes.

“No, I just—” Caroline stops, knows that she is lying. Of course she wants to be the only one, even in a situation like this—a mucky affair with a slapper. It’s the result of the pure force of her overbearing ego and the irritating habit of serial monogamy. She does, however, silently berate herself for reducing Gillian to nothing more than a slaggy stereotype. “I don’t want this to become more complicated than it already is.”

Gillian shrugs. “Seems pretty uncomplicated to me.”

Of course, Caroline thinks uncharitably, you would believe that. “Your father thinks you’re seeing someone.”

“I know.”

“You do? Did he say something to you?”

“No. I just know how he thinks. Bet that’s what your mum was grilling you about the other night, when we were out to dinner—wasn’t she?”

“Yep.”

“ _Awk_ -ward,” Gillian drawls in a fairly good American accent.

“Yep. At one point I thought I was having a heart attack and starting menopause in one fell swoop.”

Gillian laughs and, from her perch in front of the television, Calamity squeals in approval and flings her toy to the floor—it’s some sort of plastic spinning top that Caroline imagines she will trip over later, because it’s just that kind of day.

“It wasn’t funny at the time.”

“I’m sure.” Gillian drums her fingers along the back of the couch. “So what’d you say?”

“I said I didn’t know anything, and that if you were having it off with someone who cares and just let you be.”

“So wise and mature.”

“They’re just worried you’d bring some knobhead to the royal wedding.”

Gillian says nothing and Caroline regrets what she has reported, for it clearly hits a nerve. She thinks of the other part of that conversation with Celia, the news of the impending London trip—which Gillian still does not know about because Alan has not worked up the courage to tell her. It leaves her in the prescient, precarious position of waiting for the other shoe to fall right on her bloody head. _He’ll tell her, don’t worry,_ Celia had said peevishly, when Caroline had nervously broached the topic this morning before she left for work.

_But I don’t want it to ruin my afternoon shags with her,_ she had wanted to say.

Gillian remains quiet, staring into the distance, reminding Caroline of the other day when she watched the sun suspended in the windowpane, immersed so completely in the moment. Her body is torqued on the couch as half enticing odalisque, half tortured saint: Our Lady of the Imaginary Pine Forest with her nebulous crown and her weary pain, her plain magnificence. But god damn it to hell, those jeans cling to every dip and swell from the waist down and Caroline longs to race her hands and mouth over every curve as if she’s behind the wheel of a Porsche racing through the French Alps and still she remains as confused over these feelings as she did when she first became aware of them so many months ago. She cannot parse out the emotional pieces, fumbling about with them and fearing them as if they lay sizzling in an acid bath. She can only watch it all burn.

Give in, she thinks.

She is on the move, grabbing Gillian’s hips and pulling her low so that she’s completely prone on the couch. She covers Gillian’s body with her own, and breathes silent messages against Gillian’s mouth— _it’s all right, we’re all right, let me in_ —an ethereal incantation, a ritual offering accepted when Gillian opens her mouth to receive her kiss. Even though it’s akin to letting a known arsonist waltz in through one’s front door. Caroline has never quite understood the baseline of desire—sex without love, without the structure of seriousness or commitment. Perhaps it was what drove her to study chemistry, to devote herself to the sciences; she had wanted to make sense out of drives and desires and emotions, wanted to slap an empirical explanation on everything. Even love. Which makes her wonder if what she does at this moment is completely devoid of love—pure chemical reaction, as random and ephemeral as the dictates of lightning across the sky—or if it is some different kind of love, perhaps not without its limitations, something unquantifiable, in a wholly unrecognizable form.

Gillian is pulling up her skirt, grabbing her ass, and slipping a thigh between her legs, all of it happening so fast that she can barely contain the rush of blood pounding in her head and behind her eyes that saturates the world a luscious scarlet red, can hardly control the movement of her hips. “Shit,” she begs. “Stop.” Her face is pressed into Gillian’s chest and she gulps hot shallow breaths as Gillian slips a hand under the collar of her blouse and rakes her fingernails over Caroline’s back, a taste of rougher pleasures to come.

Calamity Jane, who had been providing a steady stream of ambient noise by burbling restlessly like a creek after a summer storm, releases a mighty squawk. The noise sends Caroline tumbling. The next thing she knows she’s on the floor staring at the ceiling and the sardonic bell of Gillian’s laughter rings above her. It seems a fitting cap to the day.

“I can’t believe it,” Gillian says from on high as she rises from the couch.

“What is it?”

“The cabbage has turned into a bowling ball and just bowled over a bunch of carrots.”

Caroline sighs. “You know, I think I’m done for the day.” With as much dignity as she can muster, she rises to her knees and gets a final hoist upward by latching onto Gillian’s arm.

While she’s straightening her skirt and buttoning her blouse, Gillian shifts from foot to foot nervously, like a bashful boxer expecting a punch or a kiss. She tucks her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. “You could stay,” she says quickly. “For dinner, if you like.”

God, Caroline thinks: Dinner and babies and me, wine-soaked and falling asleep in front of the telly with my head in your lap. “I shouldn’t.”

Shyly, Gillian ducks her head. “Yeah.”

“But thank you for the offer.”

“Well.” Gillian shoots her a sly look. “You owe me.”

“Maybe—Thursday?” Was it too much to hope that any fallout from the impending geriatric romp to London would be minimal?

Gillian tilts her head toward the door, at the very dim sound of tires on gravel and the rattling of an engine, sounds that Caroline has to strain to hear. “Raff’s back.” She frowns. “Way too early.”

Raff saunters in, immune to the disapproving face from his mother; perhaps it’s her customary greeting. He does, however, manage a hello to Caroline before focusing his attention on Calamity, looking at his daughter as if she is some new addition to the living room décor. The baby wraps a tiny hand around his index finger and he quietly marvels at it—before the animated saga on TV claims his attention: “Mum, look—they caught the cabbage!”

It’s true: The cabbage is finally behind bars. Apparently the obsession with the cartoon cabbage is a family thing; she wonders if Alan goes on about the cabbage as well. Quite frankly, at this point Caroline is afraid to ask.

Gillian’s focus, however, is on passing judgment. “Thought you two were going to a movie?”

Caroline assumes the other part of “you two” is Raff’s girlfriend, Calamity’s mother. Caroline could never remember her name largely because Gillian, when they were alone together, only referred to the girl as “that sad-faced sodden cow,” “that stupid cheap tart,” or some other misogynistic variant, thus contributing to Caroline’s inability to remember her name. So Caroline usually, stupidly thinks of her as _the Girl._

“Yeah, well—” Raff shrugs.

“Well what?”

“She was worried about her mum, ‘cause she’s sick—I took her over there, and—” He shrugs again.

Gillian’s jaw shifts dangerously.

Caroline fears epic swearing is imminent and grabs her coat.

Raff rolls his eyes. “Mum, don’t.”

“Don’t? Don’t what? Don’t be a bitch?”

“Well. Yeah, pretty much.”

Gillian fumes marvelously; her nostrils flare in a rather sexy fashion. Caroline edges closer to the door and is about to announce her departure when Calamity releases a very un-Calamity-like wail of distress, which alarms Raff but indicates to both herself and Gillian that either a full diaper or an empty stomach are the source of the complaint. When Raff remains standing stock still Gillian mutters “Christ’s sake” and stalks over to the baby.

“Poop?” Raff speculates unhelpfully.

“What do _you_ think?” Gillian snarls. She spirits the baby away upstairs.

Raff smiles awkwardly, shove his hands deep into his pockets, and rocks back and forth on his heels, each gesture so redolent of his mother’s nervous habits that Caroline can barely contain her amusement.  He is also strangely, unusually earnest: “How are you feeling?”

“Great. How are you?”

“Yeah, great.” Hesitantly he edges closer to Caroline and eyes her with strange, apprehensive sympathy, as if he were a missionary visiting a leper colony and she is the head leper. Because of course she would be the head leper and under her control the colony would thrive until it became a minor fiefdom supported by a thriving craft industry and homemade skin care products (obviously relying greatly on the guilt of healthy people with disposable incomes). She had thought the other evening during the dinner that Raff had looked at her oddly from time to time but had written it off as perhaps Lawrence telling him elaborate lies about how she locked up her young, impressionable children in closets and made them listen to opera, and not just any opera, but Wagner. This is what she got for attempting to “culture” her children via museums and operas—fantastical revenge stories that Lawrence enjoyed foisting upon the gullible.

“Yeah,” Caroline repeats. She realizes she cannot talk to teenaged boys unless she is shouting, lecturing, hectoring, or scolding.

“I’m really glad you’re doing all right,” he blurts.

She laughs lightly. “Well, why wouldn’t I be?”

“Um.” He pauses.

Caroline feels a fake smile plaster itself to her face—sending a silent thank-you to her mother for her meticulous training in faking certain social situations, and immediately recognizes Celia’s politely condescending tone when she says, “What are we talking about, dear?”

Raff steps even closer, voice dropping to whispery levels. “Look, Mum told me about your—I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Told you what?”

“About your, um, change of life. The—the—”

For fuck sakes, she thinks. “Menopause?” she guesses between gritted teeth.

Triumphant, Raff snaps his fingers. “That’s it!”

“Ah. Yes.” Finally, a new strand of emotion aside from affection and lust colors the tapestry of her relationship with Gillian: Homicidal rage.

“Hey, don’t be mad at Mum, she didn’t mean to tell me—she said something about going to a doctor and I thought something was wrong with _her_ and she said no, she was going with you, and—”

Caroline cuts him off. “It’s all right, no worries.”

“Oh. Good.” He smiles in relief. “So. It’s pretty exciting then?”

“Not really.”

Raff looks confused at the notion that menopause is not a source of positive excitement, perhaps wondering if there is a self-help book he could recommend for poor dear old Caroline: _Men are from Mars, Women are from Menopause._ Instead he offers to put the kettle on. She declines. They discuss the unusual developments of the cartoon—well, he discusses it and she listens politely while wondering how she could go about beating Gillian senseless with her purse without any kind of long- or short-term ramifications or permanent physical damage. She hears running water upstairs and a thump in the hallway followed by Gillian yelling, “ah, shit!”

Raff grins. “Just won a tenner.”

Caroline looks at him.

“Bet Grandad that she couldn’t stop swearing.”

“Oh.” Caroline pauses. “Is she okay up there?”

“Probably tripped over the laundry basket again.” Raff looks guilty. “Guess I should’ve put it away.”

Gillian marches downstairs with a happier baby—whom she thrusts at her son. “Here. Spend time with your daughter. Go watch cartoons.”

Raff holds Calamity as if she were strapped with explosives, says goodbye to Caroline, and wanders back toward the telly.

“Walk me out?” Caroline suggests quite innocently to Gillian.

Outside cold air slices through her. Dark gray clouds shot through with strands and swaths of lavender-orange are banked across the horizon, lumpily threatening the peaceful sky like a huddle of walruses on a beach bullying hapless penguins. They walk in front of her car, far enough away to be out of sight and hearing of anyone in the farmhouse, when Gillian stops, folds her arms, and takes in the sunset. Twilight fills her eyes. She’s the madonna, the saint, the odalisque, all of this and God knows how many other things or how many other aspects Caroline may yet discover—she is deceptively simple and alluringly complex, more so than Caroline ever imagined her to be.

She’s also uniquely beautiful, and while Caroline hates to ruin this epiphany of her mucky lover’s apparent emotional intricacies not to mention Gillian’s sublime moment of communing with nature, her considerable temper has ideas of its own. She lashes out, furiously hitting Gillian on the shoulder with her purse. “You. Stupid. Twat.”

Stunned—and equally angry—Gillian leaps out of range of Caroline’s swinging arm. “What the bloody hell’s wrong with you?”

“Would you care to tell me why your son thinks I’m going through menopause?”

“Shit.” Guiltily, Gillian rubs the back of her neck. “He told you, eh?”

“Yes, he did.”

“I’m sorry, all right? I needed an excuse for the other day when we met up, because _that bloody cow_ was trying to get out of watching her own kid, so I had to come up with something that sounded important-like, so I said I had to go with you to the doctor. I mean, I would have said I had a doctor’s appointment but then I knew Raff would worry and would want to come with, and, I don’t know, it just seemed easier to say it was you, and it had to be something sort-of serious but not _bad_ serious.” Gillian frowns.

“Yeah, great, but you know what’s going to happen now? He’s going to tell _your_ father, who will tell _my_ mother, who will regale me with anecdotes on _her_ menopause—as if I don’t remember that bloody nightmare chapter in my personal history vividly enough already—and buy me books about it and pounce on me every time I break into a sweat _until I die_.”

“All right, all right.” Gillian raises a placating hand. “Look. I’ll sort it. I’ll just tell Raff I made a mistake. Right? I’m always making mistakes. I misheard you, or it was a false diagnosis, something like that. So I’ll just tell him you’re really okay, that your ovaries are still in fighting form, top notch, sending out recruits every month—”

“God, don’t get graphic or he’ll be frightened of women forever.”

Gillian scowls. “He should be frightened of women.”

“Don’t go off on the Girl again.”

But Gillian cannot resist a cheap shot: “Silly cunt.”

Caroline rolls her eyes. “So you’ll sort it. You promise?” She opens the car door, tosses in her purse.

“Yeah, I promise.” Gillian leans against the open door. “Knew I should have told him you have webbed feet.”

“What?”

“I’m kidding. Look, no worries. Easy peasy. Consider it done.”

“Like I’m really supposed to trust you to fix this.”

A smirk settles in around the corners of Gillian’s mouth. “You don’t have a fucking choice, do you?”

“No, I don’t suppose I do. And you know what, I think it’s true about the swearing. You really do use ‘fuck’ an awful fucking lot around me.”

“Well,” Gillian says, “you’re just such a fucking inspiration to me.”

“And you, my dear—” Roughly Caroline claps a hand around Gillian’s neck and kisses her fiercely, sucking and biting on her lower lip until a white flag in the form of a sweet whimper is achieved. “—are a fucking idiot.”

After that, it’s easy to playfully shove Gillian out of the way so that she can climb in the car and slam the door shut. As she starts the engine Gillian remains standing there, arms folded across her chest and grinning stupidly, and Caroline is not certain if the scene is too seductively colored by the violet hour of twilight or the generous last rites of the sun, but she wonders and worries that the aspect of Gillian now revealed to her is that of the fool in love.


	4. the emotional life of Frankenstein's monster

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in updating, but life intervened in a rather bothersome fashion and, like the majority of you, I have been traumatized by series 3. :) Onward!

“Don’t hate me,” William says.

From her vantage point on the sofa, Caroline glances up at him. Papers are scattered on the coffee table and the cushion next to her; in order to facilitate her recurring mucky afternoons, she must keep up on paperwork at home. So far no one seems to notice that she’s working more than usual in the evenings and not taking up her usual post of sprawling wine-sodden in front of the telly while berating hapless contestants on “University Challenge,” bubble-brained newscasters, or any various sundry human gewgaws prone to spewing nonsense on screen.

“Hate you? How could I—” Caroline removes her glasses. “Wait. Oh God, what have you done?”

William shifts nervously. “You remember I showed you that photo of my friend Dylan’s mum—”

“Who?”

“You know, the one you thought looked like Hippie Fake Nigella Lawson.”

“Oh.”

“And I thought maybe you should, you know, go out with her—”

“And I said,” Caroline retorts edgily, “ _you know,_ that I wasn’t interested.”

“Right. Well.” William shoves his hands in his trouser pockets and stares at the floor. Since he’s been home his hair is getting frizzier again; she should really make him use the special shampoo and not that mint shit that his girlfriend is enamored of. Only problem is she’s become addicted to using it, because it seems to possess some sort of aphrodisiac effect on Gillian, who nuzzles her hair like a cat catching scent of the nip and moans ecstatically in a way she never moans about anything, except the possibility of consuming large quantities of pizza and/or alcohol. Who knew being organic could have such pleasing ramifications? “It seems she’s interested,” William mumbles.

“Interested in what? Being _more_ like Nigella Lawson? Becoming a celebrity chef? Making soba noodles with Nutella? Courgette fritters with porcupine flambé?”

William rolls his eyes. “You,” he says. “She’s interested in you.”

“And how, pray tell, did she become interested in me?” Caroline tosses a pen on the heap of papers. “I mean, how _dare_ you say that a reasonably attractive woman my age is interested in me! It’s _insanity._ ”

“Don’t be—” He hesitates in calling his mother _silly_ or _ridiculous,_ and instead opts to roll his eyes again. “Look, you know, I—before you really said no, mind you—I chatted you up a bit with her, and showed her your photo, and she said she’d like to meet you, she thought you looked nice—”

“ _I’m not nice_ ,” Caroline hisses.

William’s lips twitch into a rather arch, grown-up expression. “Forgive me for speaking highly of you then.”

“I told you I’m not interested in going out with anyone right now!”

“I know! And I’m sorry, but—don’t think of it as a date, just, you know, just going out for some tea, coffee, whatever? Maybe making a new friend? Jennifer is really cool.”

“Jennifer? _Jennifer?_ You’re on a first name basis with Mrs. Dylan’s Mum? Is she trying to seduce you?”

William sighs. “She’s gay.”

“Also, you know I hate that name. I have a huge mental block against that name.”

“You also have a ‘huge mental block’ against the phrase ‘lemon-scented—’”

Indeed, Caroline recoils as if she is a demon suddenly doused with holy water.

“—and pleated pants and white people with dreadlocks and I just can’t keep track of it all, Mum. Besides, it’s already arranged.”

_“What?”_ Caroline squeals.

“A drink on Friday afternoon. You and Jennifer. I spoke with Beverly and she carved some time out of your schedule then.”

Uncomprehending, she stares at him. “Who _are_ you?”

William shrugs, folds her arms across his chest, and smiles. Caroline realizes he is quite proud of himself and, as furious as she is at this moment, she’s quite proud of him too. He is his mother’s son; he gets shit done. Beverly, on the other hand, will be the recipient of many frosty looks over the coming days and perhaps a bit of a tongue lashing, although the phrase _tongue-lashing_ sounds quite pervy and of course brings Gillian to mind, and—oh Christ, Caroline thinks, what about Fredo, er, Gillian? Was Friday their next Shagday? No, it is tomorrow, involving a manic bit of deception as she will arrive stealthily at Caroline’s house for the mucky part of the afternoon while Alan and Celia are out to lunch in town—and once they return, Gillian is supposed to drive Alan to a doctor’s appointment. It sounds quite simple, but timing is everything, her mother is nothing if not unpredictable, and Caroline is uncertain how it will play out; she pictures Gillian falling out of a bedroom window and into shrubbery like an illicit lover in a very bad French film. It all seems a bit too risky. She ought not to allow Gillian to arrange these things, but the convolutions of Gillian’s thought processes hold a bizarre, hapless, look-at-the-car-crash kind of fascination. And if they are both caught in flagrante, well, that’s what these damned nosy old people get for living in close proximity to her. She has persuaded herself that she simply does not care anymore.

 It is indeed a big contrast to William’s meticulous planning. However impressive his current clandestine coup, he is still a mere sorcerer’s apprentice in comparison to his mother—instead of boldly closing the deal by walking away, he remains standing there, shuffling in a boyishly adorable fashion. “So you’ll go?” he says hopefully.

“What? No.” She picks up her glasses, puts them on. “No.” She takes them off again, hoping the gesture will somehow prove bold and authoritative. “No.” She decides to put them back on again.

“You’re going to give yourself a headache if you keep doing that,” William observes.

She plays with her papers. “Shut it.”

But he’s not done yet. “It’s just a drink. That’s all. Please, just say yes. It won’t take hardly any of your time and if it doesn’t go well, then, no harm done. Honestly.” He hesitates. “I worry about you.”

Caroline frowns. “Why?”

“All you do is work, and—I don’t know, you never seem to go out with friends or do anything fun for yourself, except drink wine and make fun of people on the telly.”

“Darling, really—”

He gazes at her earnestly, expecting genuine emotional reciprocity.

“—is there anything else in life _but_ that?”

Now he gives her that look of pained disapproval, the one that she particularly hates because it is so very similar to an expression her mother perfected ages ago and, more importantly, because despite her hopelessly ingrained smart-ass tendencies, she never, ever wants to let him down. “Mum,” he says softly.

The one word is enough to make her surrender.

“Just do it for me, would you?”

Caroline slumps into the sofa, takes off the glasses one more time and rubs her eyes, and runs her hands through her hair. “Yeah. All right. You win.” She scowls in his direction. “You must be pretty proud of yourself now. Putting this all together under my nose and guilt tripping me about it to boot.”

William grins. “It’s the triumph of my winter break, actually.” Eager, he rubs his hands together. “Cool. So I’ll brief you on the meeting tomorrow night, yeah?”

“Brief—what?”

“Jennifer works in the music industry.”

“Oh no.” Caroline pinches her brow.

“Oh yes, it’s very cool! She knows the Wu Tang Clan! All of them! And all those East Coast rappers—she’s truly badass. So we need to make sure you don’t tell her that your favorite band is something from the 80s—what’s the one you liked, Roxette? Duran Duran? A-Ha?”

“Duran Duran,” Caroline mumbles. Honestly, when she first saw a photo of them in nineteen-eighty-whatever she thought they were a slightly butch girl band. “I like Lady Gaga,” she adds feebly.

“You have to be _au courant_. You have to be cool.”

“Even more than Lady Gaga?”

William frowns. “We’ll talk about it.”

“Get out,” Caroline says flatly.

Still smiling, he walks away.

Caroline sits back, contemplates her dismal, fatal Friday. She googles Wu Tang Clan on her phone, misspelling it as “Woo Tang Clan” and even then Google is kind enough to give the aging, irrelevant white lady accurate results, among them something called a “Wu-Tang Name Generator.” She goes to that site, types in her name. It tells her that her new name is Pesty Swami. Well, she had been thinking of ditching the “Elliott” and reverting to her maiden name—perhaps this would be an even fresher start. I will not last five minutes with this woman, she thinks. But it’s just a drink, as William said, and for him, she will do it.

She tosses the phone on the table. God, what a noble sacrifice.

Should she tell Gillian? What would be the point? She has no expectation that this will develop into anything significant and frankly she does not want it to. Her life possesses a peculiar, delicate balance at the moment; everything possesses its own counterweight. Regrets and risks. Loneliness and freedom. Love and sex—albeit not with the same person. Her emotional life is duct-taped together into a Frankensteinian monster of uneasy elements. She dare not unravel the monster.

But even though she fears sulking of epic proportions on Gillian’s part, Caroline decides that full disclosure would be best. And who knows, Gillian might not even give a toss about it all; accurate predictions about that woman’s reactions and states of mind could be no more discerned from clear-minded observation and pattern recognition than from the dodgy medieval practice of interpreting chicken entrails. She resolves to mention it tomorrow—Shagday.

She has Gillian to thank for the term. _Everyday is like shagday win yourself a cheap tray,_ Gillian had texted a while back—demonstrating that, like Caroline, she had dated musical tastes.

On Shagday they are in Caroline’s bedroom and she’s sitting glasses of wine down on the nightstand, hoping to work it into her small-talk agenda beforehand—obligatory work-and-children chitchat followed by the inevitable _did you fucking finally tell Raff I’m not going through menopause_ conversation, and then topped off by the blithe, offhand incredulity of _can you believe it, my bloody son set me up on a date?_ —but no sooner does she turn around than Gillian is already stripped down to her skivvies, composed of a white bra with little pansy-like flowers on it and some teal-colored briefs that prompt Caroline to speculate that perhaps she’s really color blind—it would explain so much. But thank God that body and what it’s capable of compensates for crimes against both couture and the color spectrum.

Gillian pushes her onto the bed, kisses her roughly, and growls, “Leave the heels on.” She wonders, not for the first time, if Gillian is this aggressive with men. With John, the pathetic drunken twat, she’d have to be. Maybe she likes a challenge as much as she likes high heels and black stockings. Thankfully these mental peregrinations cease as Gillian slides both hands up Caroline’s skirt and patiently works off her panties.

Before she knows it two wonderful hours have passed and she’s sprawled limp, naked, and sated across the bed, mind released from its thousand tedious underpinnings, lulled by the gentle hissing rain of the shower from the bathroom, and with the wine untouched, the words unspoken. Winter sunlight, pale and crisp as a new apple, filters through the prickling tips of hair that hover over her eyes. Through this bright scrim, her eyelids pleasantly freighted with sleepy satisfaction, she watches the freshly showered Gillian return to the bedroom while pulling on a t-shirt. Gillian leapfrogs over her into the bed and Caroline wants nothing more than to be alone, but changes her mind—rather, her body changes her mind for her—when Gillian runs a rough thumb along the corridor of her spine, her touch a match that stirs a fire into life while striking a perfect balance between tender and firm. It’s a game of continually raised stakes. Her skin tingles and she resists, at least until the trail mapped out by the thumb is followed by the lips and the tongue.

Of course, Gillian has to ruin it all by speaking. “Hey.” She presses into Caroline, her denim-covered crotch against Caroline’s ass, her lips touching the whorls of Caroline’s ear.

Caroline moans.

“D’ya have anything to eat?”

Caroline manages to lift her head off the pillow. “What?”

“I didn’t have lunch.”

“That’s my fault?”

“Like to think so. I’m still kicking myself for missing the lasagna the other week.”

“I knew you had an ulterior motive in suggesting that.”

“Just counting on your spoiling your lad, that’s all.” She runs her hand along Caroline’s side and Caroline hates how perfect her touch is, so gentle and assured and proprietary that all hate, anger, and self-loathing burn away and what’s left in the ash heap is an incontestable solid state of desire, bare and unambiguous as bone.

Gillian, of course, is smugly amused. “You want another go first?”

“Bartering sex for food, are we?”

“Well, first tell me what you have.”

Caroline laughs into the pillow. “Oh God, you are ridiculous.”

“Come on. You _must_ have something good.”

“Beef Bourguignon.”

“Oooh. Fancy shit.”

“You’ll like it.” But mention of the dish brings forth an unwanted memory—how John always loved Beef Bourguignon when she made it, and how John liked Gillian, and how John fucked Gillian—and the chain of thought puts an unpleasant stranglehold on her desire. Abruptly she throws off Gillian, rearing up and bucking against her as if she were Wild West bronco and Gillian a drunken cowgirl.

Gillian manages not to tumble off the bed. “Christ, you are unpredictable.” She laughs. “You’re lucky I like that.”

She flips off Gillian as she throws on a robe and heads for the shower.

“I _was_ trying to do that, y’know.”

Showering helps her emotional equilibrium. And, strangely, so does the pretense of a domestic scene afterward in the kitchen: Gillian stuffs herself with Beef Bourguignon while flipping through the newspaper, and Caroline makes a production of emptying the dishwasher. Like a couple, except not. Like being with John, except the sex is exceptionally better and Gillian does not feel the need to fill the wonderfully companionable silence they share with twatty proclamations on literary theory or bitchy takedowns of work colleagues or other writers. Perhaps coupledom was overrated.

Caroline is on her second glass of wine—the one that she had initially poured for Gillian—when Gillian looks up from the paper and offers a question worthy of discussion: “Why is Harrogate obsessed with corgi puppies?”

“Oh Christ, are they _still_ going on about that?”

“Reckon so.” Gillian reads further. “She’s named all the puppies after characters in _Lord of the Rings._ ”

“If it were you, they’d be named after characters in _The Godfather_ or _Pulp Fiction,_ I suppose.”

“Well, I once had a sheep named Al Pacino—”

Fraudulent domestic bliss is unsettled by a hearty knock at the door.

After glancing out the window, Caroline sees that, unbeknownst to them, the sporty car that represents their parents’ mutual Geriatric Life Crisis has reappeared in the driveway, meaning only one thing.

“The jig is up,” she says to Gillian. “Act naturally.”

Gillian jabs a fork at her. “Great advice, that.”

Alan is at the door, pink-cheeked and surprised as he stares at Gillian’s jeep. “She’s here already?”

“Will wonders ever cease?” Caroline worries that her still-damp hair is too noticeable, that he will ask needless questions. She could say she had been exercising, that she had showered after going to a gym, but unless it were a gym that served red wine and chocolate cake while one toddled on a treadmill, the lie would hold substantially less credence than if she would say that she had run through a car wash while naked.

“But she’s never on time.” Alan frowns. “Is something wrong?” He leans in closer to Caroline and whispers, “Did she lose job?”

“No, no,” Caroline whispers back. She spots Celia from across the way and waves. “Everything’s fine, come in.” After feeling so deliciously loose and relaxed most of the afternoon her shoulders ratchet into an involuntary, stiff dread.

Alan, however, seems no better and can barely muster awkward dismay at the sight of Gillian at the table. For perhaps the first time ever, Caroline feels genuinely disappointed with him. However accepting he has been of her, he apparently still holds a backlog of recriminations against his own child. Of course, it’s always easier to cling to the reassuring talisman of fault with your own kin; the devil you know is always the devil you use most as an emotional punching bag. All the recent misunderstandings and drudged-up secrets between them are merely the jagged, visible edge of an emotional iceberg that rivals her own complicated slab of parental history. And unfortunately Eddie, Caroline thinks, is a whole other iceberg.

Quickly Gillian wipes her mouth with a napkin, throws up her arms as if being mugged, and says, around a mouthful of food that thankfully diminishes her sarcasm, “Surprise!”

“’Tis indeed.” Alan manages a weak smile. “Thought you were coming later.”

“Change of shift at work,” she replies—too quickly, Caroline thinks.

Because he knows Gillian so well, he cannot help but seek confirmation from the source: “You aren’t in trouble at work, are you?”

Gillian glares at him. Caroline can see her good mood evaporating, dissipating off her in effervescent waves like a mist from a darkened lake. “No. Why do you think that?”

Alan blusters a bit. “Oh, I don’t know—manager always seems cross with you—I just worry—”

“Yeah, well, he’s a—” The word threatening to come out of Gillian’s mouth is either _knob_ or _cunt,_ Caroline can’t decide which, but instead she settles on something a bit milder. “—tosser. All right? Everything’s fine.”

“You marked up cans incorrectly last week, so I thought—”

“Yeah yeah, all right, I did, but I was forgiven my daily bloody trespass and would it really cause the economy to fall to pieces if people paid a couple pence less for peas? Capitalism will crumble, the revolution will begin at the supermarket, right?”

“Orange?” Caroline blurts. She offers an orange to Alan, pressing it gently into the palm of his hand. Gillian looks at her as if weeks of the dueling forces of deception and sex have finally short-circuited her brain, resulting in bizarre, strained non-sequiturs.

 “Oh, thank you!” He smiles broadly. “You’re so sweet, remembering how I much I like—” Abruptly he addresses Gillian: “You see, Caroline is not afraid of oranges!”

Caroline rubs her brow. Good God, this family, she thinks. I don’t even want to know.

Gillian gives her father a rather dead-eyed, gunslinger glare. “I’m not afraid of oranges. I just don’t like them.”

“Because of silly movie,” he grumbles.

“Ah, of course—a silly movie has to be involved,” Caroline says. “I’m afraid to ask.”

Alan sighs, rolls his eyes. “ _Godfather._ ”

“It’s symbolism!” Gillian shouts. “The orange represents death! I don’t want death in my house!”

“This is what I put up with,” Alan mutters in a stage whisper to Caroline.

“Bit mad, isn’t she?” Caroline says. Trying to joke Gillian out of a mood is always a risk, but she does not know what else to do.

Alan titters in an _oh you’re so naughty_ fashion.

Gillian scowls and tosses a napkin on the counter. Perhaps ganging up on her with her father was not the wisest approach. If it goes further, Gillian might flip the table as if she were in some fifth-rate western— _totally badass!_ as William might say. “If you two are done, we should head out, yeah?”

“We’re chatting!” Alan says, feigning protest.

Gillian stands. “You’re both taking the piss, is what you’re doing.”

“Fine, we shall change topic then.” Alan smiles mischievously. “Caroline, I am told _you_ have a date tomorrow!”

Shit, Caroline thinks. How did he find out? Is anyone in this family capable of keeping their mouths shut? A quick glance at Gillian shows successive attempts to camouflage surprise with a series of tics—raised eyebrows, a spasm of her expressive mouth, drumming her fingers on the table—before she feigns renewed interest in the newspaper. But her brow is tight and her eyes electric with a current of consternation.

“It’s really not,” she says to Alan. “It’s all William’s idea—his friend’s mother—it’s just coffee, having a chat. That’s all.”

“Sometimes that’s all it takes, love.” Alan smiles.

“Yeah,” Gillian drawls flatly. “You never know.”

Alan catches the sarcastic tone in his daughter’s voice and cuts a disapproving look.  

Gillian merely frowns and stares out the window. Again Caroline marvels at how she compresses a world of hurt, a complete history of grievances, into one sorrowful expression. Alan watches her thoughtfully—perhaps regretting his teasing, his disapproving looks. Or perhaps remembering he needs her in a good mood so that she won’t cause trouble for his London getaway.

“Well.” Gently he squeezes the orange and says softly, “I’ll go get me jacket. See you outside, love.”

They follow, trailing behind him and remaining in the open doorway as he trudges across to the guesthouse. Caroline hugs herself against the chill. Is it really that cold, she wonders, or is it simply Gillian’s manner—steadfastly avoiding Caroline’s gaze as she roots around in a jacket pocket for her keys—that makes her want to retreat into house, into herself, and never come out again?

Gillian nods at her and Caroline realizes she’s about to leave without a word when she snares Gillian’s arm. “Don’t be mad.”

Caroline gets a mocking _who, me?_ look in return.

“I meant to tell you. It was all William’s doing—he set it up without my knowing and I only agreed to make him happy. I don’t really want to do it.”

“Sure. Not like there are any rules to what we’re doing, yeah? ” Gillian has a certain smile that is particularly dangerous and also incredibly alluring, at least to Caroline: violently quick as a slap across the face or a shot across the bow, bitterly vigorous and conveyed in the sharp flash of her teeth, the sardonic tilt of her mouth, the dark brows tense above her icy gaze. “Oh wait. There are rules. _Your_ bloody fucking rules. Always. As usual.”

Caroline deflates with defeat. “What are you on about?” she asks, even though she knows damn well what is forthcoming.

“All that shit you gave me the last time—asking me about John, not wanting me to be ‘involved’ with anyone else because it would get ‘complicated.’ Isn’t that what you said?”

“Using finger quotes is not a good way to advance your argument.” Caroline folds her arms even more tightly.

“Right. Way to miss the bloody point. And now you’re going to go have it off with this woman—?”

“It’s a date, Gillian—I mean, it’s barely a date. It’s not sex, there isn’t going to _be_ any sex. I don’t do that. I’m not like that.” I’m not like you, she wants to say.

“Yeah. You’ve always said you don’t do casual. Well, what am I then?”

Caroline falters. “I don’t—I don’t know.”

“Look.” Gillian’s jaw shifts while she looks at everything but Caroline. “I just want you to be honest about what you want.”

“I don’t know what I want any more than _you_ do,” Caroline retorts, tone a bit too waspish.

“Fair enough. But who knows, maybe you are more casual now. People change. After being married for so long, you might want to be a real player. Is there a word for the dyke equivalent of that?” Gillian sneers.

The word, that word, is a bracing reminder of Gillian’s explosive, random cruelty. It’s been a very long time since the word has been directed at Caroline. The last time happened at Oxford—a late spring evening just outside the botanic gardens, her sweaty hand clasped to another woman’s, and the word slung at them with casual hatred from some old tosser on a bike wearing plaid shorts and black socks with white tennis shoes. The woman she had been with—someone she met at a dance, and with whom she shared all of two dates comprised largely of vigorous drinking, sloppy snogging, and eager groping that panned out into nothing—had laughed it off, but Caroline did not. But she did not want to admit that it stung, this ridiculous, thoughtless reduction of a person into something to be ridiculed and loathed. And now, coming from this woman who has been her friend, shared her bed, and given her such pleasure, the sting is particularly poisonous and perplexing.

Caroline reacts in the only way she knows well: expertly returning the volley in a game of mutual wounding that she had been trained for at her mother’s feet, and had successfully carried on over the course of eighteen years with John. “Gee, I don’t know,” she says, and pauses for effect. “But I wonder: Is there a word for a slapper who has multiple orgasms while sleeping with a dyke?”

Gillian at least has the good grace to look abashed for several long seconds—perhaps recalling the salient details of the afternoon, or maybe just extraneously lovely ones like the rattled headboard, the charley horse in her calf, the trembling press of her fingers into Caroline’s scalp—before her expression hardens again. “I’m not like you.”

“Never said you were.”

“Well, yeah. Whatever.” Gillian rattles her car keys and squints at a sky thick with clouds, as if daring them to rain on her. Probably while mentally ticking off Caroline on a long list of fickle disappointments ranging from small to vast: weather, work, men, life. Where Caroline might fit in that list is anyone’s guess. Caroline does not know how to smooth it all over, how to fix it. Her mouth opens but she says nothing. The door of the guesthouse opens and Alan stands there waiting patiently for his daughter, who walks away from her.


	5. the ballad of Fake Hippie Nigella Lawson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Proofread after two glasses of wine.

 “He’s telling her today,” Celia says.

Caroline leans against the kitchen counter and stares morosely at the nearly empty plate Gillian had left on the table, which sits now in the sink waiting to be rinsed, and broods over the dark-streaked remains of Beef Bourguignon and a heel of unsatisfying, hard French bread branded with savage teethmarks. It should be framed, she thinks, as a work of art: _The End of the Affair._ Too bad the title was already taken.

After Alan and Gillian had left, Celia deigned to put in an appearance for tea and to update her on matters that hold so little significance to her at the moment that she cannot grasp what the old woman is on about. Caroline blinks and looks up from the sink. “What?”

“Alan is telling our Gillian about the trip,” Celia says with pointed slowness, as if Caroline is both deaf and drunk. “To London.” Her mother is in Cheshire cat mode—her voice a convincing purr, and the steeping pot of Darjeeling before her on the kitchen table a much-desired bowl of cream. She nods expectantly at the pot. “Is it done?”

Caroline shudders, stiffens, and then her eyelids flutter frantically like a kaleidoscope of butterflies before she realizes Celia refers to the tea and not her fucked-up affair with Gillian. Thankfully her mother has not reached a state of complete omniscience. Yet. “I don’t know.”

“You always let it go on too long.”

“Don’t I, though.” Caroline seizes the plate, tosses the bread into a compost bin, and rinses the plate before consigning it to the dishwasher. Is it really over? She does not know. Do I want it to be over? she asks herself. She thought she would feel genuine relief when the inevitable end arrived; rather she remains in the pathetic position of wanting more. Of course she has no idea what Gillian wants, if only because Gillian is Gillian and as such is about as predictable as a politician seeking reelection—wheedling and cajoling completely in the moment, hoping that her gratifications and appeasements will win her a prize that, once attained, will make her life complete and grant her some kind of absolute power but instead will make her question every prior movement and precious sacrifice.

“Shall I pour?” Celia asks.

“Yeah.” Caroline remains poised over the dishwasher, gripping the counter as if it were a lifebuoy. “So he’s telling her—now? As she’s driving him to a doctor? She might end up steering that bloody wreck of a Jeep into a ditch.”

“I think the plan is to stop off for a drink. Well, a drink for him, anyway.”

“You both waited too long.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“You think that only because I’m here to pick up the bloody pieces.”

“Did you two fight?”

“No. I just—I don’t like lying.”

“You aren’t lying.”

“A lie of omission. That she will know about the minute Alan tells her.”

“Caroline,” Celia says firmly, condescendingly. “It’ll be fine.”

It isn’t. When Alan returns nearly two hours later, Caroline is half-asleep on the couch after consuming half a bottle of cabernet and absorbed in some sort of half-remembered, half-imagined dream about making out with Kate in her office—how quickly her subconscious moves on, she thinks at first, but realizes that Kate has been a fixture and a firmament there for a long time, perhaps too long—when she is cruelly awakened by Lawrence poking her in the leg with a badminton racket and announcing rather bracingly that “Her Majesty Queen Celia of West Yorkshire requests an audience with you!”

Caroline hears her mother groan “Lawrence” in tones of long-suffering patience from somewhere behind the sofa.

“I am but a humble abject servant in the House of Elliot,” Lawrence says.

“More like the House of Idiot.” Pleased that she can muster a bitchy retort while half-asleep, Caroline sits up. “Now get out of here before I use that racket on you.”

“Ho ho, old woman,” Lawrence crows, “think you’re fast enough to—”

He is too focused on the wrong crone, for Celia quickly snatches the badminton racket out of his hand and glares at him. As they both watch Lawrence dash out of the room, her mother says, sotto voce, “Are you sure you didn’t do something to him as a child?”

Caroline rubs her temples.

“Are you drunk?” Celia is incredulous. “I swear, that man ruined you.”

“Who?”

“Who else? John. Made you prone to drinking too much and doubting yourself as a woman so now you think you’re—” Celia wavers an outstretched hand.

“No, actually that was my ancient Greek tutor, Mr. Figgis. Told me how fantastic Sappho was and that she was a very good role model for a young woman—well, except for the throwing herself off the cliff part. And no, I’m not drunk, but you are very much making me wish I were at this very moment.” The temple rub does not help. For some reason only anonymous, buxom young women at hair salons are capable of massaging temples in a completely effective fashion. How utterly pathetic is it, Caroline wonders, that she cannot relax herself at all except through the catatonia-inducing consumption of wine? “So I gather you are here for a reason I’m not going to like.”

Celia frowns. “It didn’t go well.”

“What a surprise.”

“Apparently Gillian is very angry. And Alan is very upset.”

“She does anger well.”

“Are you going to say anything that’s not sarcastic or obvious?”

“Probably not.”

Celia pulls a long face reminiscent of a mopey regular in a _commedia dell’arte_ production.

 “Christ’s sake, Mum, what do you want from me? I’m not going to change her mind. She’s as stubborn as her father.”

“You may get her to accept the situation somehow, to not ruin it for us. You need to sooth the savage beast.”

I had soothed the savage beast quite well until you lot fucked it all up today—this, she wishes she could say.

“Caroline, she looks up to you. She thinks very highly of you. Alan sees that, and so do I.”

She wonders if that is still true. “That doesn’t matter.”

“Please try to talk to her. I do think it will help.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking.” Caroline says it and immediately wishes she hadn’t, for her mother’s puzzled look indicates that she has latched onto the statement and like a puzzle piece will turn it over in her mind relentlessly until she knows where it fits.

For the moment, however, Celia lets it go and continues her petition. “Don’t be silly. It’s not as if Gillian can hold you responsible for what we do. Just promise me you’ll think on it.”

Noncommittal, Caroline shrugs.

“And this may help.” Celia hands her the badminton racket.

Caroline tosses the racket on the floor. “Very funny.”

“I love you too, dear.” Celia lingers for a moment, and then kisses the top of her daughter’s head. “Thank you.”

Caroline decides she needs to commune with the house. She pours more wine, turns off the TV, the lights, and stretches out on the couch, phone resting on her chest. A slanted band of light expands into a trapezoid along the ceiling and then contracts abruptly, an aperture at the hand of God shuttering out the last dim light, the last futile hope.

Gillian keeps odd hours. She can go to bed as late as two in the morning and be wide-awake by the crack of dawn to tend to the sheep. Her days seem comprised of naps and work, Red Bull and coffee, and she possesses an amazing ability to sleep anywhere. Several months ago Raff had proudly showed Caroline a photo of a sleeping Gillian sitting slumped over her kitchen table, with numerous items stacked along her back and shoulders: folded laundry, a loaf of bread, a Harry Potter book, and a bunch of bananas. Apparently he had been inspired by some website where people submitted photos of random objects stacked upon their sleeping cats; he said to Caroline that maybe he should create a website called Stuff on Gillian Greenwood. Caroline had told him it would probably hold extremely limited appeal. She now wonders if she herself would count as “stuff on Gillian Greenwood.” She sighs. Well, she certainly wouldn’t be first in line in that regard.

By the time she decides to call, it’s after ten-thirty. “Hi.” Caroline pauses. “Did I wake you?”

“No. I’m awake.” Gillian’s voice betrays nothing, is flawlessly neutral. “What’s up?”

“D’you want to meet tomorrow—for a drink, maybe? To talk?”

“I thought you had a date.” A dangerous trace of sarcasm creeps into Gillian’s voice.

“I have time.”

A long silence, a rough laugh. “Is this the big kiss-off then?”

“No,” Caroline retorts firmly. “It’s not. It’s not about—that.”

Another silence marked with an exasperated sigh. “Right. Should’ve known. It’s about this bollocks trip to London.”

“Mum said you were upset.”

“I am fucking upset, and I don’t think you’re going to change my mind—and why aren’t _you_ upset?”

“Because I don’t think it’s worth fighting about.”

“You knew about this.” Gillian pauses. “And you didn’t tell me.”

“It wasn’t my place to tell you.”

“Bullshit. If it’d been reversed—if I knew and you didn’t and I hadn’t told you, you’d have ripped off my bloody head.”

Caroline says nothing because it’s true.

“My father is _not well._ He shouldn’t be traipsing all over the bloody globe just because your mum has him convinced he’s eighteen again.”

“What makes you think it’s all her doing? Surely he has a say in the matter.”

Gillian exhales. “He’ll do anything to make her happy, anything she wants—” She pauses. “Sounds great on paper, don’t it? Loving someone so much you’d do anything for them. Until you realize you’re twisting yourself into knots you cannot ever fucking undo just trying to please someone else.”

Her voice, beveled to the edge of bitterness, makes Caroline wince—largely because she knows that Gillian is talking more about herself than Alan. Not that saying this would help matters.

“So don’t tell me he’s thinking clearly or any bollocks like that,” Gillian says.

“Look, maybe that’s a good point, but—why don’t we meet to talk about it?”

“Don’t see what there is to talk about.”

“That’s ’cause you’re clearly in a shit mood,” Caroline says gently.

Another long pause filled with digital emptiness until Gillian finally admits it. “Yeah.”

“Meet me outside the Spa Gardens.” She recalls Gillian saying how much she liked that particular spot; that on those splendid rare occasions when she had enough free time, she would drive there and then walk and sit for hours—wait, Caroline thinks. Did she have sex in the gardens? Of course she would. But with who? This rapidly emergent emotion she quickly diagnoses—and just as frantically rejects and ignores—is, she believes, jealousy. She twitches and rubs her temple again—oh God, she thinks, why doesn’t that work? Oh God, my life is an eternal bloody mess. “I’ll bring coffee, and I’ll text you in the morning to set up a time. Is that all right?”

“Yeah.” Gillian’s voice is softer this time. “All right.”

She rings off, goes back to staring at the ceiling, and promptly falls asleep. On the couch she remains all night, sleeping straight on through until the morning when she wakes up to weak tea, stale granola, and William’s mother-henning. He tries to prep her on the date with Fake Hippie Nigella Lawson, but she’s too sleepy and distracted to pay attention; she keeps looking at her phone, hoping that Gillian might text some random weirdness as she is prone to do many mornings—bastardized Morrissey lyrics, reports on the color and consistency of Calamity’s poo, preposterous questions along the lines of _do you think america will ever take over mexico might fuck up tequila sply—_ something that would indicate things were once again normal between them. Whatever that meant anymore.

Over breakfast William attempts wardrobe recommendations. “Try not to look matronly.”

“I’ll wear my leather chaps then.”

He looks aghast for a moment before realizing she is, as usual, completely unserious. Unfortunately this does not discourage him. “Did you listen to the Wu Tang Clan CD I lent you?”

“It makes a lovely coaster, thank you, darling.”

“You’re going to deliberately mess this up, aren’t you?”

“Just by being myself, sweetheart. Just by being myself.”

William shakes his head.

When she arrives at school later, the first thing she does is glare at Beverly, who quivers momentarily before announcing in forced cheery tones that the Standards and Testing people have canceled their meeting with her later this morning, which means Caroline has more time to—“you know,” Beverly concludes lamely.

“No, I don’t know. To what, spend more time with that blasted woman I’m supposed to see later today? You think I’m going to shag her brains out?” Caroline says. “Drag her off to some cheap hotel with bedbugs and stained, pilled sheets and we’ll drink Jagermeister straight from the bloody bottle and watch bad porn in between frantic bouts of lovemaking?” Caroline stops abruptly. Over the years Beverly has witnessed many a fit of pique from her, but this outburst could, she notes soberly, shatter the delicate chrysalis in which Beverly, a unicorn representing a lost world of decorum and good manners, resides. For once Caroline is truly repentant. “I’m sorry.”

As usual, Beverly saves the situation with her unfailing good grace. “It’s all right, really. You’ve been under a terrible deal of stress, and well—” Beverly pauses and pats Caroline on the arm. “I’ve, er, always greatly admired your imagination.”

It’s possibly the nicest thing anyone has said to her in a long time. At least, the nicest nonsexual thing, anyway; lately she counts on Gillian for compliments on her hair, her scent, her legs, her tits, her stamina, her oral talents. In this instance, objectification has its rewards. Quickly she texts Gillian to arrange a meeting later in the morning at the gardens.

She arrives at the garden at the designated time, armed with coffee and surprised to find that the typically tardy Gillian is already there, sitting in her Jeep. The weather has not cooperated with her plan that they would actually walk in the garden: A light rain mists over everything, a silvery stipple over faded greenery and the rotted gold of dead leaves, the cars and the streets, beading along her waxed jacket as she walks quickly across the street to—what? Negotiate? Surrender? All she knows is that as usual, she must make the first move.

Gillian says nothing as Caroline offers a cup of coffee to her before climbing into the passenger side of the Jeep. It’s a reversal of the last time they met in a motor vehicle. She wonders if Gillian remembers that, wonders if Gillian felt as nervous then as she does now.

Gillian takes the cup with a nod and swipes dots of rain off the lid with the sleeve of her jacket. After a tentative sip to gauge heat level, she downs half of it like a Jagerbomb. She’s quiet and wary and Caroline is uncertain of how to proceed. Opening with some snogging sounds pleasant, but Gillian would rightly interpret that as too manipulative. Perhaps simple affection would do? But nothing, it seems, is ever simple with them. She opens the conversation with the same overture that kicked off the first night they were together: Pushing Gillian’s hair away from the nape of her neck and cupping her hand there, reveling in the heat of her skin, the soft undergrowth of her hair, and longing to dive underneath her shirt to trace the strong, sharp line of her shoulder that forms an emotional tightrope between submission and resistance. Irritated, Gillian twitches and rolls her neck, and Caroline has no recourse but to retreat. She removes her hand and her palm tingles in protest, a hundred thousand nerves drumming her skin.  

“You wanted to talk,” Gillian reminds her pointedly.

“Yes. Well. Am I not allowed to touch you?”

“Trying to butter me up.”

“Is it working?”

“No. I just feel half angry and half aroused.”

“Sort of your usual coeval state, isn’t it?”

Gillian leans into the door. “Everything’s a joke with you.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re just here as an agent of your mother.”

“You make her sound like MI-5.” Shit. Another joke, another foul look. “I’m sorry.” Perhaps best to clear the emotional palate by holding silence a bit longer. She looks into the garden. Bare trees sketched against a gray sky, empty benches, and a man in a bright orange anorak walking a dog. “I understand why you’re upset. Why you’re worried. But your father’s a grown man. You can’t make him do what he doesn’t want to do.”

“Want to tell me something I don’t know?”

“Yeah, I know. And I know why you want him to stay put, where you can keep an eye on him. But you can’t always do that. You just—can’t. You have to let him go.” She pauses. “It’s not like he’s going to Afghanistan or something—I’m not saying that as a joke,” she adds hastily. “I mean, it’s just London. Not Amsterdam, like they were initially talking about.”

“Amsterdam?” Unexpectedly Gillian’s voice goes up about an octave into a shrieking range. Which indicates that, as far as she’s concerned, Amsterdam is as remote and potentially dangerous as Afghanistan.

“Gillian.” She sighs deeply. “He wants to enjoy himself while he can. He wants to create memories. He wants to make up for lost time. You can be angry and disapproving all you want. And if you stay that way all you’ll do is cast a shadow over everything—this trip, and maybe everything after it, and it’ll be more thing, one more resentment, one more disappointment, between the two of you.”

This resonates with Gillian. Her shoulders relax, the grip on her coffee cup loosens. She stares into her lap. “I want him to be safe. I need him to be safe.”

“I know.”

“He’s about all I’ve got.”

Caroline wants to remind her that she has a son, a granddaughter—and what, me? she thinks caustically. Do you really have me? Do you really want me? But she understands Gillian’s meaning, if only because they’ve talked of it in sleepy, boozily postcoital moments. Her father, Gillian believes, is the only person who loves her unconditionally, who accepts her as she is. Christ knows she’s looked far and wide for someone like him, someone like him to love. He knows the truth of what happened with Eddie. At any rate he suspects it—this is what she has told Caroline. This is what she senses. But she has never spoken to her father about it. The fallow truth lay between them, threatening to burst through the ground beneath their feet at any moment.

With her head hanging low, Gillian’s loose, wild hair obscures her expression. She makes a gesture as if swiping at tears, and Caroline gives in to the impulsive desire to comfort. She strokes Gillian’s hair and tucks a hank of it around a large, prominent ear.

It does not have the intended effect. Gillian’s exhales furiously and collapses into herself like a glorious folding star. She gives in to every dark anger and resentment that has been stewing within her for months. Arms tightly lashed over her chest, she explodes: “Why do you always have to be so _bloody fucking right about everything_?”

Caroline winces, is thrown back to their very first meeting: That blind fury—her own, as well as Gillian’s—and that covert spark between them, quite unlike anything she had felt before because afterwards the nape of her neck tingled, her palms sweated, and a euphoric, dizzying nausea shot through her, all of it the cumulative effect of a strange fever taking hold. “I’m sorry.” God, two sincere apologies in one day, she thinks. I must be turning into a human being again. “I’m not always right, and I don’t always like being right,” she says.

“Bullshit,” Gillian says.

The dog walker is gone from the park. Nothing but gray sky, dormant plants, and fallen leaves twirling mindlessly as marionettes in the wind. There is nothing she can say at the moment to make anything better. Caroline believes she has made a tactical error—it was too soon to speak with Gillian about this. Gillian needs a little more time to take it in, to have a think on it; then, and only then, will she be capable of looking at the situation with anything approaching calm reason. “All right. Look. Why don’t you call me later—”

Gillian practically snarls at her. “Why, so you can schedule a shag?”

Caroline’s magnanimity for the day suffers a complete collapse; later, she will blame this on a lack of coffee. “Oh, piss off! I was going to say if you wanted to talk, but if you’re going to be a complete cunt about everything, don’t bother.”

She gets out of the Jeep. As she walks back to her own vehicle, she hears Gillian tear away, the motor ripping through the desolate street, and worries for a fearfully frantic moment that Gillian will attempt to run her over, and then miserably realizes that she left her coffee in the Jeep. She sits in her own car for a long time, eyes closed. It wasn’t going to last forever, was it? Has she done irreparable damage to whatever friendship they had? She was selfish—as was Gillian. It’s not as if she didn’t realize it before. Now that the consequences are apparent and vaporizing over her as stealthily as the rain, she finally regrets everything that has happened between them these past few weeks.

Except that the lone voice of honesty within her tells her that she doesn’t.

None of this leaves her in the right frame of mind for her quasi-date with Fake Hippie Nigella Lawson. She sits in her own jeep until it becomes unavoidable, until her sense of duty and propriety kicks in—her mother would be surprised to know that even lesbian dating prompted some sense of responsible adult behavior in her—and she takes off.

After Caroline sits in the café for nearly twenty minutes, Jennifer finally arrives. She wears sunglasses indoors—a twat move but Caroline reserves judgment for the moment, who knows, perhaps she’s nervous too—and carries a whiff of cigarettes about her like a shroud. It’s not until well after she orders a drink that she finally takes off the glasses. Her eyes are an inscrutable dark brown, unreadable and so unlike Kate’s brown eyes, which always possessed—at least to Caroline—a singular kind of clarity and kindness, something always easily comprehended. She orders a vodka and tonic and Caroline stares with surreptitious disappointment at her own lukewarm coffee; apparently Jennifer’s interpretation of “just a drink” is a lot more liberal and fun than her own, or Jennifer is not about to be bound by convention. She’s easy on the eyes and Caroline has high hopes that perhaps this could be the start of something promising until Jennifer opens her mouth.

“You know,” she says, “I usually date women younger than you.”

And then Caroline sees that she has discovered a rare woodland creature of the great north even more tactless than the fabled Gillian Greenwood. Is this her type now, the kind of person she attracts? It’s all too miserable to bear. She checks out. Outside the rain metamorphoses into wet, clotting snow, a calming film of analog static. She remembers her father sitting in the living room one late evening just staring into the white noise of the TV set and with his hand anchored to a glass of gin, as if the glowing solace of this slowly fraying world trapped within a bubble—sometimes the flecks of static looked so big she imagined them as particles spiraling loose from the TV and racing around the living room like animated amoebas—was the only thing keeping him tethered to the real one.

When Caroline starts paying attention to Jennifer’s monologue again, she begins counting down the minutes to the moment she can make a graceful exit.

“I was at Heathrow and Christ they told me that, one, my flight was not direct and two, I would be landing in JFK and not Laguardia. Have you ever been to New York? No? Don’t fly into JFK, trust me on this. Insanity. I was yelling at the desk clerk for minutes. The topper was that I was not in first class. I suppose roughing it every once in a while gives you a new perspective, well a new perspective on how people do not shower regularly. I don’t mean to sound, you know, like a complete twat but common people really give me a bloody headache. I suppose I might have dealt with the whole fiasco better save for that bloody Paki cab driver. They cannot drive to save their lives, really. I’m just trying to make it, you know. Trying to keep it together. To quote Lennon, ‘Christ, you know it ain’t easy.’”

Caroline pictures Vladimir Lenin hanging out with his mate Leon Trotsky over vodka shots and complaining thus—it certainly makes sense, having a revolution does put a lot on one’s plate—until she realizes Jennifer means John Lennon.

“I hope you don’t think I’m racist or anything but those fucking cabbies drive me mad. I mean, I work with rappers, for God’s sake.”

The problem is that yes, she does think it racist, but doubts that throwing a self-righteous fit in a café would enlighten anyone or accomplish anything. Telling Jennifer off might feel good, though. Thankfully her phone vibrates and her unlikely savior is Celia.

“Well, how did it go with Gillian?” Celia says.

“Mum!” Caroline shouts. “Slow down. What happened?”

“What are earth are you talking about?”

“Are you sure he’s OK?”

“Caroline, I am really concerned about your drinking now.”

“Of course. I’ll be there as soon as possible.”

“Oh wait, now. I get it. You’re on that date with _that woman_ and you’re trying to get out of it. You’re so clever!”

Did everyone know it? Caroline wonders. “All right, I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

“Don’t oversell,” Celia advises.

“He’ll be fine, Mum. Don’t worry.”

“But really, I must say that exploiting Alan’s condition just to get out of a date—”

Caroline rings off, makes her apologies, and leaves Fake Hippie Nigella Lawson with the bill, paltry as it is. Perhaps a lifetime with no companion aside from good vibrator and with an endless supply of wine would not be so utterly tragic after all.


	6. blue green blue

 

“Well, what was wrong with her?” Alan asks.

“Aside from being a woman, you mean?” Celia says.

“Shut it,” Caroline says. Such a response prompted by Celia’s tactlessness is purely automatic now, as is Alan’s disapproving “Oh!” directed at his beloved and accompanied by a scowling pout.

This tag team of shame possesses no effect on Celia. “I mean, _really,_ ” she says.

It is faintly mortifying and truly awkward to conduct a post-mortem on one's grown-up lesbian date with one's homophobic mother and her sweet-natured husband who happens to be, however unknowingly, the father of one's erstwhile shag buddy. Especially on a Monday afternoon over rapidly cooling tea. At least it is not a Tuesday, Caroline thinks. She slouches in a guesthouse chair with heels dangling from her feet like broken hooves—as if she’s minor devil exhausted from casting spells and stealing souls rather than a random cog caught in the modern education system—and nibbles on a dry biscuit while enduring her mother’s gimlet-eyed disapproval. She waits for Celia to make a comment about either (1) how bad posture can affect middle-aged women with osteoporosis, even though as far as Caroline knows she does not have osteoporosis, or (2) how common and slatternly she looks sitting like that, and Caroline is quite certain that if not for Alan’s presence she would probably amend a “like Gillian” to the imagined second comment.

She ignores Celia. “She just wasn’t my type, that’s all,” she says to Alan. She does not wish to get into specifics. “Too—I don’t know. Something. Just didn’t fit.”

“Shame, love,” Alan says. “But there are others out there.”

Caroline twitches, wonders if he would be so open-minded if he knew—the twitch turns into a full-on shuddering spasm.

“Are you cold, dear? I hope you’re not getting sick,” Celia says.

“Fine,” Caroline squeaks, just as her mobile pings. While grateful for the distraction, she worries that it might be the topic of conversation herself—Hippie Fake Nigella Lawson—texting. On Saturday after the date Caroline had received a three-word text from her: _You are intriguing._  Caroline is not surprised she gave this impression; it’s easy to be mysterious when one hardly says a damned thing. She possesses no intention of mentioning the text to present company and hasn’t even mentioned it to William, who seemed genuinely disappointed that the date did not go well. Nor has she responded to the text because she does not want to encourage anything, even though by her usual accurate estimation of character Hippie Fake Nigella Lawson seems the type who would assume that silence represented a challenge issued, would enjoy said presumptuous challenge, and would initiate a bold pattern of escalation resulting in, Caroline fears, tit photos or worse.

 _Snatch shots_ is the phrase that merrily leaps into Caroline’s mind—unfortunately just as her mother begins to lecture: “Ah, the new etiquette,” Celia says, glaring at the mobile. “All bow down to technology, which must always be responded to before the actual human being you’re with!”

“Could be important,” Alan, ever the optimist, retorts.

It’s not—it’s John. Now that she’s begun to ignore his actual phone calls, he sends texts sometimes. Usually they are oracle-like recriminations along the lines of _You mad vindictive lesbian cow. You will perish alone and miserable._ Today, however, his tone is ridiculously uxorious: _I know this is very last minute and you’re probably busy and I don’t want to bother you, but would you like to have dinner tonight? Anywhere you like. I mean, I’d even come over and cook something for you. Spaghetti Bolognese?_

Once upon a time that dish had been one of her favorites until John had declared her tastes “too pedestrian and bordering on boring.” She still cannot fix the point in their marriage when she descended from the lofty status of beautiful alluring muse to that of boring mad bitch. But after so much gin-fueled excitement with Judith, she supposes boring is looking rather good these days. Boring wins the day. Boring is the tortoise defeating the hare. Boring is the new black. Actually a salesgirl recently told Caroline that charcoal is the new black—a successful ploy to get her to buy the blouse she’s currently wearing. Perhaps one day plaid will be the new black, she thinks, and Gillian will be fashionable and that, like frogs falling from the skies, will truly signify end times. Then she chastises herself for sexual bitterness.

Wearily sarcastic, Celia asks, “Probably have another date lined up already, don’t you?”

“Yes. I am working my way through the women of Yorkshire.” Perhaps tit photos wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Celia issues a long-suffering sigh and Alan says cheekily, “Sounds like a lot of bother.”

“I’m sure you needn’t go to that extreme,” Celia says. “You’re good-looking, clever, you have a good job. You’d be a catch.”

Mildly shocked, Caroline blinks and looks at Alan.

He raises his right arm. “I put nothing in tea, hand to God.”

“Is it _really_ so rare that I compliment you?” Celia says.

Caroline deletes a row of frantic old texts from John. “Christmas bloody miracle.”

“Fine, come have dinner with us. We’re going to see Harry. I’ll compliment you all evening.”

“As tempting as that sounds—no. Thank you. I’m beat.”

The phone pings. It’s John. Again. _I’m worried about Lawrence. He’s really not talking to me and I don’t know what to do. Need to talk with you about that._

Because it’s her fault that his sons don’t talk to him. _Maybe you should ask Lawrence to dinner and not me,_ she types back.

“You didn’t get out much this weekend,” Alan says worriedly.

“No,” Caroline admits. “I just needed some time to myself.” She had spent most of the weekend moping, drinking, taking bubble baths, and attempting to read various books. Several years ago a student with a mad crush had given her a copy of _The Golden Compass_ to read. Every few months she reads a bit of it, has a nightmare about talking polar bears trying to kill her, and puts it aside in favor of back issues of _Vanity Fair._ This weekend was no different. On Saturday she had begged off a trip to the farmhouse; just as Gillian had needed distance and time to process the thought of her father gallivanting off to London, so Caroline requires the same to process the potential change in their relationship/shagship/whatever-the-fuck-it-is-ship.

Processing, she thinks. God, I really am a lesbian. As if confirmation is truly merited.

A third text from John. _You don’t understand what it’s like. Please try to consider it from my perspective. It feels like a loss, like a huge personal loss, like something I’ll never get back. It is loss itself._

Caroline sighs deeply.

“Oh good Lord, it’s John texting you, isn’t it?” Celia asks.

“How’d you know?”

“Nothing makes you groan with disgust quite like him.”

Several minutes later, as she’s waving off Celia and Alan and walking back over to the house, John pulls out all the stops on the way to Literary Pretension Junction by quoting Ben Jonson. As if trotting out Jonson’s most common, overused quote would somehow impress her: _Farewell thou child of my right hand!_ Twenty minutes and one glass of cabernet later, she hears her mother and Alan pleasantly bickering in the driveway as they prepare to leave for dinner. Another text: _Do you understand my meaning? It’s like a real death, you know?_

 _You’re a fucking idiot,_ she replies, hopeful that her bluntness is the coup de grace to the exchange.

When the mobile makes its stealthy submarine ping again she seriously considers shoving it down the garbage disposal; William did tell her that her mobile was getting “seriously outdated,” so there is a crumb of reason to end its practical existence. Masochist to the bitter end, however, Caroline picks it up one more time. This time it does not spout Ben Jonson at her but a Morrissey lyric: _You are repressed but you’re remarkably dressed._ She’s about to give John props, as they say, for momentarily being less of a nitwit and summing up her character rather well before realizing the text is not from him. It’s from Gillian.

“Oh shit,” she says aloud. She thinks it’s a good kind of “oh shit,” an eleventh-hour reprieve of sorts from a higher authority that will prevent her from flipping the switch of the electric chair and, like an executioner in an old film noir, terminating that phase of their relationship. That she thinks now in terms of old movies, just like Gillian, is not a good sign. She chugs the cabernet, assuming, as usual, that it will somehow aid and abet good decision-making. No, she thinks, it’s not like the electric chair—it’s like a neural pathway, a neural pathway of shagging, and the text message is once again stimulating neurons that must die or change—

Caroline glares at the half-empty wine bottle. Not helping. Alas, it’s too late. The neurons along that particular pathway are partying harder than Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. Which reminds Caroline that she has always wanted to go to New Orleans, but that is neither here nor there in her current dilemma.

 _You have no idea,_ she responds, a vagary that can stand on its own, or lead the reader to fill in the blank. God, I am so bloody clever, she thinks—even as, with every shallow breath, she stares at the screen with the rapt attention of a puppy awaiting kibble.

Finally: _You home?_

Caroline swallows nervously, ignores the increasingly irregular beating of her heart, and types _yes._

_Five minutes._

We’re doing this again, she thinks. Oh Christ, _are_ we doing this again?

Fifteen minutes later she opens the door to Gillian on the stoop wearing an oversized striped knit cap and aviator sunglasses, and it takes every bit of restraint Caroline possesses not to double over in laughter. Gillian resembles one of those semi-stoned denizens of many a Hebden Bridge café, those who scrawl epic prose poems about menstruation (a requisite canto for each phase of the cycle) or plot elaborate sci-fi graphic novels about a planet with two suns, eight moons, dildo-shaped satellites, and a caste system of sadomasochistic sex slaves planning underground revolutions, all meticulously detailed into Moleskine journals and all while drinking too many cortados or green tea lattes or similarly precious beverages and simultaneously breaking up loudly, angrily, and desolately with lovers over the mobile.

“I’m sorry.” After a brief but successful struggle with the giggles, Caroline somehow manages deadpan. “The meth lab is two houses down.”

Gillian smirks skeptically. “There’s really a meth lab in this neighborhood of toffs?”

“I hope not. Did you steal that hat from Raff?”

“He has about fifty of them.” Gillian gestures vaguely, half-pointing toward her. “May I?”

Caroline steps aside elaborately and, as Gillian swaggers by, she snatches the striped beanie off her head amid a tiny crackle of static as the natural world once again spitefully reminds her that she has no control over chemical reactions, her own included. Staring at the cap, she feels ridiculous when she recognizes the gesture for what it is: She’s like a schoolboy pulling a girl’s pigtails or twisting a bra strap, coveting beauty and cavorting away before he’s caught out. “So. What’s with the hat?”

“You’ve told me I should try to be discreet when I come here. So I parked a few roads over, and um, you know, I’m trying to look different, like—”

“Like a drug dealer?”

“No, not the intent—well, I’m not sure what I was trying to do. But now that I think about it, maybe you need to liven up your rep a bit.” Gillian trots out her best BBC accent, drenched in smoky faux sophistication: “‘Later in the programme, an expose of the notorious Heroin Headmistress, Caroline Elliot.’”

“Not the kind of image makeover I need.” Caroline closes the door, leans against the wall, and lectures herself: You will not be charmed, you will not be amused. But her hands, tucked behind her back, scrunch the soft synthetic material of Gillian’s cap and it is all she can do to not press the cap to her face, to take in her scent—at least she would hope it’s Gillian’s scent and not her son’s. “You’re in a good mood.”

“I am.” Gillian removes the sunglasses. “Despite the fact that the other day you called me a cunt.”

“Upset about that, eh?”

“Well, I haven’t been called a cunt in—” Gillian stops, folds the temples of the aviators, which click lightly in her hand, and then frowns. “—I was going to say a whole week but yesterday some wanker in the store called me one, bloody idiot who wanted cardamom—I mean, if it’s not in the spice section then we don’t fucking have it, you know? Was he expecting some special stash of cardamom in the back? Something we only dole out to the most elite customers?” She grins shyly, self-consciously aware that her performance is one part oddball apology, one part dubious foul-mouthed charm designed to curry favor with the lady of the house. Caroline is surprised she didn’t wear the emergency rain poncho trashbag that she keeps tucked under a seat in her Jeep; that is always good for a solid laugh.

Caroline is charmed, however dubiously. Still she resists. She’s not certain if it’s to punish Gillian in some way, or if it’s a legitimate yet feeble attempt at clearing the air and negotiating some kind of boundary. Because she is so uncertain of this, of everything. “To be fair, I called you a cunt because you were acting cunty. And besides, you’d called me a dyke, so I think we’re sort of even on that score.”

Gillian sighs. “Yeah, sorry.” She apologizes like a teenaged boy, all mumbles and shuffling and hands thrust in pockets and looking everywhere but at Caroline. Who is the awkward boy in this scenario? she wonders, before remembering that everything between them exists outside the prescribed set of rules they both knew fairly well. It’s different territory—no country for men.

She thinks Gillian would be pleased at this movie joke and makes note of it for another time; right now she is too focused on plowing ahead with her point because, as usual, she’d rather win the argument than actually risk emotional connection. “You should be sorry because seriously, if right now we were both put in a lesbian lineup and random heterosexuals were asked to ‘pick out the dyke,’ I daresay they’d gravitate toward the plaid-and-jeans-wearing cunt.”

Gillian throws up her hands in a _you’re hopeless_ gesture. “Shit, there you go again. And you’re being very stereotypical. Lesbians look more like you these days, all posh bitches with tailored suits and skirts and lipstick.”

“You’ve been watching too much porn.”

“No.” Gillian is defiant. “I’ve been in a dyke—sorry, _lesbian_ —club.”

Caroline stares, wide-eyed. “You never told me that.”

“Didn’t know I need to present some sort of lesbian résumé to you. It was a couple years ago—” Gillian makes a rumbly noise deep in her throat that sounds disturbingly close to the clutch of her truck caught in reverse. “I was just—curious.”

“Oh,” Caroline purrs, “I do love how curious you are.”

Gillian flushes adorably. “Nothing happened.”

“Well, you’re such a model of virtue I’d never imagine it.”

“All right, I did mess around a bit with someone in the bathroom.” Gillian turns thoughtful. Like Celine Dion, it’s all coming back to her now. “Actually got her bra off in the stall—”

“God bless the Jagerbomb.”

“Then her ex—er, maybe ex, dunno, someone she was with—came in looking for her. Had to make a quick exit. Narrowly avoided fisticuffs.”

“Oh dear.”

The story meanders to a triumphant conclusion: “But I did get her phone number. Never called, though. I reckon that was rude.”

“I’m sure she was heartbroken.” Coolly Caroline crosses her ankles, makes a point of casually examining her fingernails even as her free hand continues to desperately clutch the soft beanie cap, even though she burns with curiosity. _What’s your type? Did she look like me? Why didn’t you call her? Why do you always want to fuck or make out in cars and public restrooms, you ridiculous creature?_

“No, I’m just saying—” Gillian shrugs self-consciously. “You know, don’t be stereotypical.”

“What else could I have possibly gleaned but that from that fascinating little parable, Gillian? Thank you. Lesson learned.”

“Cunt,” Gillian says.

They burst into laughter. Caroline shakes her head, quietly amazed at how easily they fall back in after falling out. With everyone else in her life, it seems, a certain strenuous amount of effort is involved to smooth the way after a row—gifts of beauty or expense or both, apologies repetitive and agonized, airings of grievances that approach the Dickensian in terms of length and suffering. Her mother in particular excels at the last item. With Gillian it’s swearing, insults, inappropriate anecdotes, and mumbled sorrys. All of it genuine, all of it working on her in some mysterious way, appealing directly to her senses—like a painting or a symphony, something that bypasses her hopelessly linear, scientific mind, something not easily dissected. And all is as it was before. As for the future, embodied and expressed in the inexplicable yearning that now fills Caroline and turns her feelings toward the tender, that remains as nebulous and undefined as ever.

“Did you really,” she asks, “come here to tell me all that?”

Gillian stares at the sunglasses in her hand, and pockets them in her jacket. “No.” She winces. “I talked to m’dad. And, uh, thought you’d want to know—everything’s sorted.” Her hand wavers in the air, fingers flaring as if she is a bishop granting a particularly florid kind of benediction. “I gave him leave,” she says sarcastically, “to go to London. Told him to have fun and all that. That I was okay with it.” She shrugs. “He seems happy. And your mum is over the moon.”

“They did seem rather chipper today,” Caroline says, and then adds morosely: “But then, they always seem disgustingly happy.”

“Really fucking annoying, innit?”

“I’m surprised they didn’t say anything to me.”

“Probably don’t want to jinx it.”

Caroline finds renewed interest in the floor and in her feet, still painfully shod in heels. Why the hell didn’t she take them off earlier?  “So,” she asks carefully, “ _are_ you okay with it? With him going to London?”

Gillian shrugs again. “Not like I have much choice in the matter,” she says roughly. “But I want him to be happy. YOLO, as they say.”

“Oh God, not you too. I swear if one more student says that to me I’m going to bring back caning.”

Gillian giggles. She slouches against the wall opposite Caroline, arms folded, hip jutted. “You look really good today,” she says softly, nodding at Caroline’s blouse. “That’s new.”

Let the games begin, Caroline thinks. “It is.”

“Black.” Gillian rocks on her heels.

“Charcoal, if you want to get technical about it.”

“Still. Very, uh, authoritative. Very Head Bitch in Charge, I might say.”

Only Gillian could turn being called a bitch into a mad sexy compliment that makes the nape of her neck tingle. Despite this Caroline mopes, because: “Beverly asked me if someone died.”

Gillian laughs again.

Caroline thinks she should say something nice in return but does not, mainly because the most readily available bit of flattery is also the one she is certain would sound utterly moronic: _that t-shirt makes your eyes look so beautiful, even more so than usual—_ even though it is true. The t-shirt is celadon green and the color runs like a river down Gillian’s torso, a beautiful swath banked on either side by questionable plaid, and something about this particular shade wreaks gorgeous havoc with the uniformly intense blue of Gillian’s eyes; it’s an imagined, seductive contagion scrambling her genetic code and Caroline is absorbed in documenting this phenomena—waiting for a shutter of light or a tilt of Gillian’s head for the color to flow effortlessly from blue to green and back again and thinking, _yes, yes, all for the greater glory of science_ —until she realizes that Gillian is actually talking again and the deeper pitch of her tone indicates discussion of serious, adult kind of emotional shit. Whenever Gillian wades into the confessional, Caroline transforms into a sailor on shore leave, displaying a mindless obeisance to her libido that is an emotional puzzle worthy of Freud. Or Pavlov. Is it self-sabotage? Bad timing? Utter insensitivity? Or she’s just bewilderingly attractive when she’s all somber and serious? _For Christ’s sake you pathetic middle-aged twatwaffle,_ Caroline’s brain commands frantically, _pay attention._

“—and so the other day I didn’t mean to—” Gillian stops, hugs herself. “—get so, you know, aggro on you. I was just—I mean, shit, I hated not knowing, then having him and you treat me with kid gloves. Like I’m an idiot, a fool. He always does that, and I know that, and I feel so bloody stupid because then, of course, I go off half-cocked just like he expects. It’s a vicious circle. But I can’t help it—I hate it. Being the last to know.”

“Yeah. I get it.” Caroline scratches her brow. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

Gillian shakes her head. “Not your fault.”

“It might’ve saved us all some trouble.”

“Or maybe not.” As Gillian rubs her neck and stares at her trainers Caroline thinks, kiss her, just kiss her. “So.”

“So?”

“Um, how was your date?”

“Shit.”

“Really?”

Caroline cannot tell if she is minutely pleased or genuinely disappointed. “Really.”

“Sorry.”

“Really?”

Gillian looks amused. “Aren’t _you_ sorry?”

“I didn’t expect much out of it.”

She does not know what else to say, and apparently neither does Gillian, who watches her with careful, calculated longing before unleashing another unclassifiable natural phenomena—her violently quick smile, intangible, bright, fleeting. “That it, then?”

Caroline thinks, you are the only thing that makes me happy right now but I don’t know if that’s a good thing, I don’t know what to do about it, I don’t know how long that feeling will last.

She’s trying to piece together a decent, eloquent way of saying all this when Gillian asks, plaintively, slowly, “Why is it so hard for you to say what you want?” Blue green blue. Her eyes flash a warning in colors not usually associated with stop or yield, but rather something new and coolly fatalistic: _go full tilt mad._ Rilke had famously written _you must change your life_ and somehow, like a bad translation, it’s become corrupted and misdirected in her mind as _you must fuck up your life._ The beauty of the moment seems to be telling her this.

“Do you require some kind of definitive answer?” Caroline says, so helplessly set in permanent indecision that she cannot even say, yes, I want you, if only for a few hours. She’s the wick in the middle of a candle: furiously burning and then capriciously snuffed out, smoldering in the same lake of hard wax every day.

“You sound like a bloody politician. You’ll be in a shadow cabinet ’fore you know it.”

“You’re here, and—”

 “So we might as well, right?” Gillian shakes her head. “Y’know, I see why she got fucking frustrated with you.”

Don’t, Caroline almost says. Don’t say her name.

“Kate, I mean. Yeah, go ahead and give me the Head Bitch look all you want, just saying her name don’t mean she’s going to pop in on a cloud of fairy dust riding a bloody unicorn—however much you want that.”

“She’s actually a little afraid of horses, so I don’t think she’d like a unicorn—maybe a spaceship or a dolphin, I don’t know.”

Gillian is giving her the cut-the-bullshit glare.

She sighs. “So what’s your point? I’m impossible to talk to and even more impossible to love? Thanks, Captain Obvious.” Quietly she congratulates herself on proper utilization of a pop culture reference, even though her awareness of it stems from Lawrence calling her that all the damned time.

Gillian will have none of her self-pity. “You’re impossible, you’ve got that part right.” She tucks her hands in the back pockets of her jeans “Look, if you want me to go—it’s all right, it’s fine, just say something.”

If words fail, well—Caroline knows her body will not, and so her dithering brain gives up, gives out, gives in. She drops the cap, which is probably stretched out beyond practical use after being mashed so relentlessly and executes a strident if wobbly lunge at Gillian. Her hands clasp Gillian’s wrists, delicately pinning them against the wall as if they are beautiful, rare insects to be mounted in a vitrine; against the soft _v_ of her hand, Gillian’s pulse fans out in a faint throb, the singular, final beat of a dragonfly’s wing.

This close, with her lips against Gillian’s ear and with the misguided belief that somehow the universe will not hear and will not know, Caroline can give the assurance that Gillian craves: “I don’t want you to go.”

Gillian shivers, rolls her shoulders, breathes heavily through her nose—bringing to Caroline’s mind the reaction of a injured animal finally surrendering to a gorgeously baited trap. Yet her wrists flex under Caroline’s grip, a thrilling reminder of her strength.

“Am I really impossible?” she whispers to Gillian.

“To resist.” An attempt to capture Caroline’s mouth in a kiss fails—Gillian arches up just as Caroline pulls back teasingly to admire in glorious, fragmented close-up the glint of Gillian’s teeth, the feral bend of her lips, her flashing eyes and their beautiful warnings. She releases one of Gillian’s wrists, presses her hand against Gillian’s torso, finding reassurance and then arousal in the heat and the curve of flesh just beneath the t-shirt. She strays lower and grabs Gillian’s belt buckle—the metal bracingly cold and the crumbly soft leather almost roughly undone in her grip. She unbuckles the belt.

Gillian tenses against her, the heel of her hand hard against Caroline’s shoulder, and says, quite simply, “Oh.” As if getting fucked standing up in a hallway, let alone this hallway in the House of Toff—as she sometimes refers to Caroline’s home—is so radically novel a concept that it had never occurred to her.

A button pops, a zipper parts like the Red Sea—speaking of which, Gillian’s panties appear to be red today, thin burgundy stripes alternating with white, rather cute-looking, and Caroline is momentarily perturbed by her silent approval of these wardrobe items: first the t-shirt, now the panties—isn’t this how people fall in love? All the things that one found annoying and disturbing about someone suddenly become lovely and wonderful? The green t-shirt and the candy-striped undies _actually match._ Which leads to even more disquieting speculation: Is Gillian color coordinating her outfits for Christmas?

“What’s wrong?” Gillian gives her an irritated look. She has already cleverly popped several buttons of Caroline’s blouse with one hand.

Caroline blinks. “Sorry. I was thinking about Christmas.”

“Christ’s sake!” Gillian practically spits out her loathing of the holiday: “ _Sod_ Christmas.” She pulls free her other wrist and both hands plow through Caroline’s hair as they kiss. Gillian’s kisses are always explosions, regardless of whether they are lobbed with ferocious intent or exquisite stealth—lips, tongue, breath overwhelm Caroline so much that her knees shake and her ankles twist dangerously, tiredly. She stumbles while standing perfectly still.

Everything is a frantic mix of motion. Gillian’s foot thuds against the wall as she sheds her jacket, which falls limp to the floor. Her hand slides into Caroline’s blouse and, as if she’s reclaiming some lost territory, rough fingertips mark a boundary across Caroline’s collarbone. She shifts, spreads her legs, and hisses a rich sibilant _shhhh_ into Caroline’s neck as she struggles and fails to say the curse word nearest and dearest to her heart, or the one that is at least in the top three: shit. Because Caroline’s hand is between her legs, snared in a net of desire, lodged between cotton panties and pubic hair, seeking out both the devil and the deep blue sea. She’s warm and wet and oh God oh Christ all mighty, Caroline thinks, it’s perfect to be inside her. On the coldest day of the season she’s breaking into a sweat, trying to keep them both standing by the sheer force of her body pressed so tightly against Gillian. One of Gillian’s hands is painfully tight across her neck, blunt fingernails nipping at her scalp, and the other hand clutches her ass. Gillian’s strength is frightening and arousing but the albatross of trust between them allays her fears; they are pushed into the background, a blurry detail in an old Polaroid that morphs with light and age—is that dark object on the table a book or a plate, is that shadow a tree or a man?—resisting total recall until the most inconvenient moment.

Gillian moves faster against her hand, gasping into Caroline’s throat as Caroline imagines the fragile crystalline structures of her exhalations as they shatter against her skin: Water. Ketone. Acetone. Methanol. Ethanol. Her feet hurt. Her thighs hold the prize of a sweet, damp ache. Tired exhilaration takes up residence in her muscles. When Gillian finally comes, her throaty cry sounds disturbingly loud—the echo bounces in the hallway and brings Caroline back into the cold dull reality of fucking her stepsister in so defiantly visible a location that she cannot believe she has permitted this to happen.

In mutual exhaustion, they prop each other up. Gillian still clings to her. The hot, heavy breaths thrumming along her skin become zephyrs tickling her neck, and then light kisses tracking up toward her jawline. She’s awkwardly aware that she’s still inside Gillian and, as gently as possible, extracts her hand. And yet she is reluctant to break contact completely; the damp heat of her hand presses firmly against Gillian’s belly.

She’s reeling. Dizzy from desire, from what she’s just done. Her head rests on Gillian’s shoulder. “Jesus Christ,” she says, voice muffled by cheap plaid, “you are too much. You are too dangerous.”

She has a moment’s resolve to end it. Now. To finally fucking pull herself together, lurch off toward the kitchen, wash her hands, button her blouse, and tell Gillian that this is the last time. Shaky, she tries to stand straight and disentangle herself, but finds it harder than imagined to escape the devil and the deep blue sea, that beautiful chasm between Gillian’s strength and softness, her torments and her tenderness.

As if sensing this, Gillian seizes Caroline’s hand. Her eyes signal blue green blue again—defiant, steady, holding Caroline’s gaze. She kisses the palm, her mouth runs roughshod over sticky fingers, sampling her own taste, and her teeth sink carefully into the tender juncture between thumb and forefinger as if she’s biting into an overripe fruit that threatens sweet disintegration into juicy pulp. The frisson of pain and pleasure redirects Caroline’s resolve—she’s not tired, it’s not over yet, and who cares about coordinated outfits or even Christmas for that matter?

Fucking neural pathways. 

“I’m dangerous,” Gillian says, “because you need me to be dangerous.”


	7. all appearances to the contrary

With nagging urgency—not unlike Lassie warning oblivious adults that Timmy has fallen down in the well—pain fetches Caroline from deep sleep. The bedroom is a patchwork of dusk; thick shadows of objects imposed against a gesso of gray light that is strangely silver and lush, as if everything is painted in the sated atmosphere of the afterglow. Every flutter of her eyelids brings her closer to waking. The pain continues. She wonders—not panicking quite yet—if she is having a heart attack. Because of her own encroaching decrepitude, not to mention Alan’s delicate condition and her mother’s resultant paranoia, she obsesses over heart attacks now more than ever. Then she realizes the source of her discomfort is, not surprisingly, Gillian—who lies on top of her right arm. This in turn triggers awareness of something profoundly more horrifying than heart attack, stroke, impending nerve death, necrotic flesh falling off the bone, pleated pants, instant coffee, or an imaginary child falling down a well:

They are cuddling.

Side by side, they face each other. Gillian is curled into her like an opening quotation mark nesting snug against a capital T and in clear violation of not only the vague politesse of illicit affairs, but also the rules of good typography. She sleep-snuffles against Caroline’s shoulder. Her arm is tightly lashed around Caroline’s waist as a rigging around a mast, and in the small of Caroline’s back her fingers twitch out an erratic Morse Code for dreamers. Her sturdy leg is draped heavily over Caroline’s thigh. For someone of so compact a build, Gillian possesses a mightily impressive sprawl—like a fallen tree, or a fungus.

Caroline takes a moment to consider the inappropriateness of comparing Gillian to a fungus. God help me if I ever have to get romantic with anyone and say romantic things, she thinks. Perhaps Kate really and truly dodged the bullet. She sighs. The arm is killing her. Extrication from her current situation, however, will be a delicate process. She attempts to break it down in her usual methodical fashion:

  1.      Don’t fucking think about Kate.
  2.      Make sure you are fully awake. She blinks frantically, rubs her face vigorously with her free hand, and wiggles the fingers attached to her trapped arm. Apparently the limb is not dead yet.
  3.      Which raises the question: Is Gillian is dead? Because she feels as heavy and inanimate as a bag of sand. Right, no, she’s making that adorable puppy-snuffle noise. This is a relief because explaining a dead, naked sheep farmer—particularly _this_ naked sheep farmer—in your bed would be truly awkward.
  4.      Listen carefully. Is anyone else in the house? She waits several long minutes for a sign, a noise. Silence blankets the house as thickly as shadows. Again, this is good. All is as anticipated. In a move to successfully avoid the tedium of his boring yet degenerate mother and the flashy albeit inconsiderate alcoholism of his narcissistic father, Lawrence seems to have taken up permanent residence with Angus. William should still be hanging out with his mate Dylan, the spawn of Fake Hippie Nigella Lawson. The old people should be meandering through both pints of bitter and anecdotes told a thousand times previously. John and Judith are probably face-down in liquor or vomit or a sloppy mixture of both, but this is mere sadistic wishing on her part.
  5.      Take a moment to appreciate how good the sex was. If Gillian was impelled to so comprehensive a performance by the threat of competition, perhaps you should go out on another bad date very soon.
  6.      Sex Appreciation Part II, Electric Boogaloo: Congratulate yourself on giving her a multiple orgasm, especially since she has claimed she’s always been a “one-trick pony” in that department. Go on, bask in it—you deserve it for surviving those powerful thighs—her trembling hands pulling at your hair, her sweet rough voice, half-pleading and half-demanding that you don’t stop. You didn’t stop. She never sounded so vulnerable, so desperate before. Not even when confessing murder.
  7.      Perhaps consider merely waking her so that you may move your arm. Tell yourself the lie that you are not doing this because you are truly a really really _really_ nice person. She must not get enough sleep. Since when do you care about _that_? It’s not your fault her life is so complicated. And thus within the span of ten seconds the illusion crumbles as you are reminded once again that you are Celia Dawson’s daughter.
  8.      That’s more like it. So—maybe just shove her off the bed? Given how badly she reacted to getting smacked in the head with a pillow, probably not a good approach.
  9.      Admit that you really don’t want to move because while your arm may be dying, you are, in these series of moments, not let down, not miserable, and contained in a fragile translucent bubble of grudging contentedness while enjoying—on a purely aesthetic level, of course—her warmth, her scent, her embrace, the faint tickle of her hair near your face.
  10.   Until it reaches this point: oh shit, my fucking arm.



 

With excruciating, gentle slowness, Caroline tries sliding the arm out from under Gillian’s body. The prickling sensation escalates, a fine, stinging downpour of pain against bare skin. The problem, of course, is that Gillian’s strong arm is still wrapped around her waist, ensuring that they move as one. So as she pulls away she only succeeds in contorting herself in a new and potentially dangerous cuddling position: On her back and with Gillian on top of her, pinning her down and breathing heavily and hotly between her breasts like a broken steam valve.

At least the blood circulation in her arm resumes. Happy at this development, she twiddles her fingers.

The position change, however, has initiated a gradual wake-up process for Gillian. Her breathing shifts from snuffle-snuffle to snort-snuffle to growly sigh to leisurely groan. She stirs, stretches her legs, arches her back, but does not for a moment relinquish her hold on Caroline. Instead she clears her throat and says, “Stop thinking.”

Startled by the hoarse prescience of the command, Caroline stares at the messy crown of hair practically in her face. Is that a gray hair? she thinks hopefully. “What?”

“Stop thinking.”

“I’m not thinking.” Caroline whines a denial.

“You are.”

“No.”

“You’ve ruined my sleep.”

“Fuck off. I wasn’t thinking anything.”

“Don’t lie. I hear your brain grinding.”

Caroline says nothing, stares at the ceiling,

“Now you’re thinking of some smart-arse thing to say,” Gillian accuses.

“No.” Caroline pauses. “Maybe I was thinking what to buy you for Christmas.”

Gillian looks up, squinting at her with sleepy disgust. “What is it with you and fucking Christmas lately?”

“Kris Kringle’s hobnailed jackboot is upon my tender throat.”

The imagery earns an amused smile from Gillian. She resumes her contented position. Idly and lightly she caresses Caroline’s breast, perhaps intending for nothing more than simple affection but it’s distracting and arousing enough that Caroline is relieved when conversation is revived several minutes later: “Screwdrivers,” Gillian says.

Which makes Caroline think of the cocktail and how she wouldn’t mind having one right about now. “What?”

“Need a set of screwdrivers.”

“That’s a very boring gift.”

“I’m a very boring person.”

You were very exciting this afternoon, Caroline wants to say, but cannot let go of the banality of the proposed gift. “Really. Screwdrivers?”

“They’re old, plus I lost my small one. Just hope Monica Vitti didn’t eat it.”

“I know I’m going to regret asking—”

“Monica Vitti is my best girl. My Mule ewe. Gonna foal in a couple weeks.”

“You’re not concerned she’s going to pop off early?”

“Nope. Did my calculations right on this.”

Caroline frowns. “Is Monica Vitti the one who always glares at me?”

“Wouldn’t say she’s glaring at you. It’s scientific fact that head bitches can recognize each other across species.”

In retribution she slaps Gillian’s ass lightly enough to earn a manic, truant giggle that reverberates against her skin.

“Some head she is—I wouldn’t be dumb enough to eat a screwdriver.” She realizes that she is stroking Gillian’s hair, worries that it’s too romantic a gesture, abruptly stops, panics that she may have hurt Gillian’s feelings, and resumes again. “Look, I have to buy you something better than that, if only because my mother would give me all sorts of shit for buying you something so cheap and so flagrantly butch.”

“Socks?”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“I’d ask for a new tractor but I reckon that’s out of your price range. Although I guess that would be ‘flagrantly butch’ as well.”

“Well, I could lend you some money toward it, like a down payment—” She has no idea why the hell she is offering this. She can barely afford to keep the house, let alone lend someone a chunk of money for such a substantial purchase.

Additionally, she has conveniently forgotten that if anyone can take offense at anything with ease, it’s Gillian—who once again lifts her head and glares, the subject of money stoking more fury within her than the loathsome spectacle of Christmas. “I don’t need a bloody handout. All right?”

“It wouldn’t be a handout—why are you so touchy?”

“Because you got more money than I do and I don’t need anything from you.”

“You need _something_ from me, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“Shit.” Gillian attempts to disentangle herself from not only Caroline but also the sheet, which is entwined around her left leg like a desperate ghostly grasp from another realm and brings to Caroline’s mind a production of _Don Giovanni_ where the titular character is dragged down into a hell that resembled a whirlwind of down comforters, which suggested that hell is not unlike a holiday sale at Marks and Spencer. Sometimes these modernish, avant-garde versions just did not work.

Cast as the unrepentant rake in their own little Yorkshire operetta, Gillian flails and accidentally kicks Caroline—the bitchy mezzo—in the shin. “Couldn’t stop thinking for one bloody minute, you had to say something—”

“Why is this my fault? _And stop kicking me._ ”

“These fucking sheets! How much did _they_ cost?”

Dismally, Caroline recalls how much she hates arguing while naked, even if her sparring opponent is operating at a similar disadvantage—particularly in this instance as she believes Gillian is fitter, firmer, and all around more capable of carefree and confident nudity than she.

She shoves Gillian off, which somehow liberates the sheet’s demon hold. “You overreact about everything! You never think before you jump down someone’s throat.” She rubs her eyes, runs a hand through her hair. “This is just—God, I don’t even know anymore. Maybe we need to think about stopping this. If we’re not shagging, we’re bitching at each other. I mean, the former part is great, the other part, as they say, notsomuch.”

She risks a glance down at Gillian, who has finally, fully untangled herself from the sheets, and who laughs ruefully, shaking her head at such crazy talk. “Why is it when we're mucking around and having a perfectly nice time—”

“‘Nice?’” Caroline echoes incredulously. “Just ‘nice?’”

“Well. I. Er.” Gillian stammers, hums, clears her throat, busies herself with pummeling a pillow. “Don’t want you to get a swollen head about it.”

“No, but a real compliment—”

“I said you were ‘fucking amazing’ earlier, didn’t I?”

“No, you said the _orgasms_ were fucking amazing,” Caroline retorts, hair-splitting always a favorite diversion.

Gillian covers both eyes with the heels of her hands. “Look. I’m trying to say—we’re having a _fucking amazing_ time, it’s relaxing and fun, and almost always you choose right after to try and have some big serious bloody conversation when the last thing _I_ want to do is have a big serious bloody conversation. I mean, men never want to talk afterwards, unless it’s about footy or food. Is this a lesbian thing?”

“And here we go again. Have you ever attempted to keep track of all the insanely stupid things you say in the course of a day? Because it’s just adding incentive to, if not ending this thing now, than smothering you to death with that fucking pillow!”

Gillian flops onto her back, sighs, reconciles herself with the bed sheet—both actions indicating, to Caroline’s monumental irritation, that she has no intention of leaving. Caroline sits up, draws her knees up to her chest, and wraps her arms around her legs. Her chin rests in the crest between two kneecaps. In this moment of self-containment she feels less vulnerable; her body goes from the exultant, skilled state of _fucking amazing_ to nothing more than a rickety cage built on bones and sinew, booby-trapped with squishy internal organs, and trip-wired with arteries and veins and emotions.

“You know what I think it is?” Gillian says. “I think you do self-sabotage.” When her bold pronouncement prompts neither a bitchy counterattack nor a snide remark, she gains steam. “Yeah. You’re always banging on with me about self-sabotage, what about you? You never let yourself enjoy anything for any substantial period of time, and I don’t know why. You’ve got it good. You’ve got a good job that you enjoy, you’ve got a beautiful home, you’ve got great kids—all right, Lawrence is a bit of a cunt but he’ll grow out of it. I think. And I know things haven’t gone quite the way you wanted.” Gillian pauses, and adds gently, “And I’m sorry about that. But all in all—it’s not as bad as you think.” She tucks an arm under her head. “Why don't you finally admit it?”

Why don’t you, knob? she asks herself, and exhales a sirocco that channels between the imagined mountain peaks of her knees. Wait, siroccos are desert winds, aren’t they? Something to Google later. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah. I do. I know I do. You're right.”

She knows the companionable silence that follows won’t last for too long. Gillian sits up quickly—hair so awry that she’d easily win an award for best bedhead, sheet draped over one shoulder like a toga, and grinning so ridiculously and so infectiously that Caroline cannot begrudge her a victory and even smiles in return. “You don’t have to look so smug.”

“I'm just enjoying the moment.”

“Are we having a moment, dear?”

“Sounding a bit like your mum there, _dear._ ”

“Oh, fuck off.”

Skin against skin, one simple touch—the rasp of Gillian’s palm along her upper arm—dismantles her defense, collapses the bodily cage. She unfurls. Gillian is on her, straddling her, fingers lace through her hair, pulling with tender force to expose the lines of her throat for a feast. It’s like baring your neck in front of a lion, letting a scorpion hitch a ride on your back across the river while hoping that you won’t get stung and end up drowning. Speaking of, she is drowning. Recently she read somewhere that the signs of drowning really aren’t as apparent and obvious as everyone, including Stevie Smith, once thought. There’s no waving, no flailing; it’s subtle and quick and the sea rolls over your head, beatific and shimmering, one time too many. Maybe that’s why no seems to care she’s drowning; they simply haven’t noticed. Maybe she’s enjoying too much, this particular kind of drowning. Gillian’s breath is warm against her carotid artery, an imperceptible backbeat against her pulse, and Gillian’s lips trace the whorls of her ear as prelude to a whisper:

“I always give you an out, don’t I?” Gillian says. “Every time.”

“I know.”

“And yet—you always come back for more.”

“I just want to make certain,” Caroline replies, “that this is an extremely bad idea.”

The dim room, an abattoir of light, drains Gillian’s eyes of the vibrancy witnessed only a couple hours ago in the hallway; now they are a cool, gray blue, resigned to unknown prophecies. But the lightning of her smile, here and gone, breathtaking and sad, remains unchanged. “It’s funny. I thought by now—maybe you’d see me differently,” she says.

With this woman Caroline always feels as if she is on the verge of some great epiphany, but something always pulls her back from the potential of these grand moments. Something aside from her clay feet, her hidebound soul. Again she thinks of Don Giovanni, the hand of the Commendatore upon his shoulder before the final descent. “Maybe I will. If—”

Gillian cuts her off by snaring her mouth in a kiss, biting gently and sucking hard on her lower lip. “If?”

If I let go of everything I fear and everything that everyone expects of me. Which slips out of Caroline’s mouth as: “If you fuck me again.”

This time Gillian’s smile lingers. “Get in the shower then, you toff bitch.”


	8. the hypotenuse of desire

Sex in the shower or bath was, in Caroline’s limited experiences, neither a romantic nor erotic idyll. In fact, she envisaged it as something akin to naked tobogganing: slipping and sliding God knows where with one’s genitalia and tender bits at the capricious mercies of the chilly and cruel fates. Was any amount of pleasure—and typically she had received little to none from her paltry, traumatic experiences contained within the bath—worth slippage, elbows in the face, knees banged and bruised, ankles twisted, eyes blinded with shampoo, and assault from behind by a bath brush?

So she displayed a generous amount of reluctance when Gillian suggested it, even though Gillian’s confidence and care were encouraging: In the shower she positioned Caroline carefully, as if she were Helmut Newton on a photoshoot and Caroline some naked, bored, half-starved supermodel: “Hands here, spread your legs just so. Little more. Good. How’s the water?”

“Hitting me in the face,” Caroline said grumpily.

“Too hard? Too hot?”

“No. I guess not.” She sighed impatiently. “Now what?”

Gillian grinned cheekily. “Down periscope,” she said and, with enviable aplomb, dropped to her knees.

“Wait. What?” God, it was like being in trigonometry class all over again—just when she thought she knew exactly what was going on, the teacher was several long elegant moves ahead of not only her, but also the entire class. Still, she thought—while gulping in a shocked breath as the plush tip of Gillian’s tongue reached its final destination and offered a teasing prelude to the all-encompassing warmth of her mouth—this was a hell of a lot more satisfying than figuring out sines and cosines and hypotenuses. Nonetheless she recognized that she was positioned as a hypotenuse in relation to the shower wall. It was the cherry on top of the cherry: Who knew this shit would actually prove sort of useful someday? The water pulsed against her face, spilled into her mouth. Her sliding fingertips gained little purchase upon the slick tiles. Her knees buckled while Gillian retained a firm, reassuring grip on her trembling legs. It was intense and rhythmic and over all too quickly, rolling through her veins like a fire trapped in a tunnel and leaving every part of her body tingling and threatening to shoot ecstasy—the genuine kind, not the kind for pisshead clubgoers—through her fingertips as if she were some comic book heroine: Super Sapphic Girl. Afterward she cursed her greed, her inability in staving off the climax for a longer, even more satisfying release; she never should have ignored all those articles in  _Cosmo._  As it was, she clung to the wall tiles in breathless, blissful languor while ignoring both the receding, cooling water pressure and Gillian griping about the confusing bounty of personal hygiene products at her disposal: “All this organic shit. Always forget what’s what. Think last time I washed my hair with avocado mint body gel.”

Later, Caroline is in the bedroom, clean, clothed, composed, and rooting through a travel kit for a spare toothbrush when she receives a text from Lawrence—a carefully worded, humble request to stay overnight at Angus’s and couched in such respectful, submissive tones that it is patently obvious that Angus himself composed it. Under normal circumstances she might succumb to that raging need for control and follow through with a blistering phone call or a furious trip to Angus’s house, but she’s far too mellowed out to do anything about it at the moment and besides, she thinks, Angus’s creativity should be rewarded somehow. She texts what she deems a munificent response: _Fine, but if you are not in school tomorrow morning I will rip you to bloody pieces and sell you to a dog food company._   

That’s too much, she thinks. No need to go full-scale Medea. She deletes  _and sell you to a dog food company_ and hits send. Perfect. That done, she focuses once again on the task of getting Gillian the hell out of the house in a timely fashion. She pads over to the bathroom where Gillian, clean and dressed and waiting for a toothbrush, is lazily drying her hair with a towel.

Like a great romantic offering, Caroline proudly proffers the toothbrush.

Gillian looks skeptical.

“It’s for travel. I used it once, months ago.”

“It’s tiny.” Gillian pulls the towel off her head and drapes it around her neck. Her wild, damp hair weeps for the civilizing effect of comb. “ _And_ you’ve used it.”

“Given where your mouth has been today, should you really concern yourself with the provenance of my toothbrush?”

“Fair point.” She grabs the brush, dots the bristles with a generous dollop of toothpaste, and brushes with such manic intensity that Caroline fears for her enamel.

“So,” Caroline begins. “This Friday. The parents must be ferried to the train station.”

Mouth full of froth, Gillian stares at her, confused.

“Your father doesn’t want to leave his fancy car parked in Halifax.”

Gillian rolls her eyes.

“Thus, one of us must drive them.”

Gillian points at her.

“Fine. I can do it. Do you want to come with?”

Gillian shakes her head.

“Really?”

Gillian spits out teal-white froth, rinses her mouth, and says, “Fuck no.”

“All right, then, if you don’t want to come.”

“Geez, thanks, mum.” Gillian swipes at her face with the towel. “Dunno know if I should—I don’t want to risk saying anything stupid. Getting them off to a bad start. Nearly blew my top with him again over the weekend.”

“What happened this time?”

“Oh, Christ.” Gillian starts flossing, and Caroline finds it impressive that she can reel off both a grievance against her father and a strand of floss; she grimaces, snarling fiercely into the mirror whilst weaving the white thread around her teeth. “Started out as nothing. You know, he was going on about all the things he and Celia are going to do in London and shit and I just said—you know, ’cause it’s  _true_ —‘I’m gonna miss you.’ And you know what he says?” She pauses for dramatic effect.

Dutifully, Caroline shakes her head while admiring the excellent condition of Gillian’s teeth. No wonder she left such a deep, savage bite mark upon Caroline’s shoulder.

“Nothing nice, I tell you that. Doesn’t say, ‘I’m gonna miss you too’ or anything like that. No. He says, ‘Just keep out of trouble while I’m gone.’ Like I’m bloody sixteen again and not a grown woman with a son and a granddaughter that I take care of most of the time and two fucking jobs, one of which is running a fucking farm by myself. This is how I’m rewarded by being all ‘yeah, great, go to London.’”

After idealizing and envying the relationship between Gillian and her father for so long, Caroline has finally noticed the razor-thin fissures in their foundation, subtly marking it as imperfect and damaged but decidedly whole and likely to remain that way. She’s convinced that her Dubious Erotic Entanglement with Gillian—she still can’t bring herself to call it an affair—shifted her perspective to a certain degree, permitting her a closer vantage point from which to view father and daughter, and to form her own theories. She compares it to buying a rare, beautiful object and, after much ostentatious admiration, noticing the flaws that, strangely, make you love it all the more. Something that moving, something that dazzling and deceptive, more often than not will casually seduce one into the act of forgiveness.

It is still an outsider’s perspective. She sees the beauty of the whole; Gillian walks on the fault lines. Admittedly it has affected her view of twinkly, cherubic Alan—apparently even good people can have shit relationships with their children. And in more idle moments she has mulled over the dangerous question of what, if anything, he knew of when Gillian was married to Eddie: Could he really, truly have not known what was happening to her?

But as for the whole London thing, Caroline had thought—based on what Gillian had said just hours prior—all was well and her relations with her father were perhaps entering a period of ascendance. “I thought,” she says carefully, “you were at peace about the whole thing.”

Incredulous, Gillian stares at Caroline’s reflection in the mirror and snaps, “Jesus Christ, Caroline. Do you think I’m at peace about _anything_?”

The outburst falls as easily from her mouth as the floss from her fingertips tumbles into the bin. But it takes something out of her. Head bowed, she leans into the sink, hands gripping the edge, as the muscles in her forearms undulate—more fault lines, these in the woman herself, revelatory cracks of rage and resentment in a surfeit of raw beauty.

Helpless, Caroline’s mind goes into the abstract. She mulls over the properties of fire. Heat. How this thing between them ignited and combusted, how this conflagration changed the simplest of interactions, for she no longer trusts herself to perform a simple gesture of affection, nor offer basic words of comfort. All the properties that have composed their relationship seem irreparably altered, leaving behind an elemental volatility that she cannot predict. All her investigations and observations into what this was and where it might lead appear inconclusive. But as one of her professors once observed, sometimes the most seductive theories, those that are all elegance and elusiveness, are those that cannot successfully be proven.

Gillian closes her eyes, shakes her head, pinches the bridge of her nose. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“It’s not. But nice of you to say so.”

In the hope of at least amusing her cranky shagmate, Caroline goes full-on British, polished with her most posh accent and in a ridiculous falsetto: “Shall I put the kettle on?”

It works. Gillian smiles, laughs softly. “No. Thanks. I should shove off straightaway.”

“Right.” She leaves Gillian to finish up and walks out into the hall, where a penumbra of light—artificial and extending from downstairs, not the wintry glow of a few hours ago that cast their limbs milky blue in viscous twilight—brushes at the edges of her clothes. She stops, tiptoes toward the landing as if the light can actually hear her, and stares down into the hallway. She recognizes the rhythm of William’s steps before he actually appears—the erratic clop of a skittish colt, as opposed to Lawrence’s lazy teenaged trundle. Still wearing a coat, William appears. She is a spectator in her own home, watching from the balcony as an actor, so absorbed in his role that he forgets he has an audience, trawls across an empty stage. He stops at the foot of the stairs, removes his cap, and shakes out his Einstein hair. Then he glances up, sees her, and smiles. “Mum. Why’s it so dark in here? All the lights are off downstairs.”

“I was upstairs—reading.”

A sympathetic squint. “Are you not feeling well?”

“I’m fine.” She pauses. Don’t panic, she tells herself.

 _I’m panicking,_ an inner voice protests.

Don’t panic.

She clears her throat. “You’re back early.”

“Yeah, well. Dylan and his mum were having a bit of a row, thought I should, er, leg it.” He looks sheepish.

“Oh.” Keep him talking. She takes a few steps down the stairs. “What about?”

William leans casually against the wall. “Dunno. A bunch of things that blew up into one big thing—you know how it is—well, not with me, obviously, but Lawrence.” He makes a face. “God, you know what, we didn’t eat anything. I’m famished.”

“Go into the kitchen. I’ll heat up something for you.”

“Not the coq au vin. That’s too much.”

“I’ll make you an omelet,” she blurts.

“Really?” He loves omelets. He always considered them a special treat, even though she made them nearly every weekend. If only everyone acted so utterly delighted and grateful at such minor kindnesses.

“Yes. Ham. Cheese. Chives.”

“You always have to put something green in it.”

“It’s my maternal duty.”

She’s seconds from galloping down the remainder of the stairs and dragging him into the kitchen when, in the heightened stillness of the dark house, the hairdryer roars from the bathroom.

Both she and William stare in the general direction of the bathroom. She wonders if she can convince him that a ghost haunts the house, a restless spirit, perhaps, who used to be a hairdresser.

“Oh,” William says. “You have—company.” His expression is unreadable, almost mask-like, and she knows he learned this talent for self-preservation from her; she has worn a variety of masks since before he was even born.

To Caroline’s amazement she does not say what she thinks, which is _oh fucking shit hell bollocks._  Stating the obvious seems safe, though. “Yes,” she says and tries desperately to think of a credible lie involving Gillian:  _She was fixing a leak in the bathroom when the pipe burst and sprayed her everywhere and she was wet everywhere, and I mean everywhere, and had to take off her clothes, and—now I’m distracted by thinking of her without clothes, oh shit, think think think you twatwaffle you are panicking again, you are so useless._

William’s head bobs furiously. “Right.”

“Yes,” Caroline repeats. He appears frozen to the spot. “Look. Why don’t you go in the kitchen? I’ll be down in a moment.”

“Right.”

“Right.”

With a sticky, formal awkwardness completely foreign to them both, they practically bow at one another as if they are gentlemen in an eighteenth-century novel agreeing to duel at dawn. If nothing else, she knows she can always count on William for propriety—and to do as she asks.

Caroline does an about-face on the stairs, trips, stubs her bare toe, bites back a furious  _fuck._  Dizzily she grips the bannister, takes several deep breaths, and stomps back up to the bathroom. Flinging open the bathroom door, she is momentarily startled by a thumping noise, surprised to see it empty, and then irritated that something appears wedged behind the door.

The object behind the door turns out to be Gillian, who emerges while wincing and rubbing her nose. “What the hell are you doing?”

Caroline shuts the door, sits on the toilet. “William’s here.”

“Oh shit.”

“He heard the hair dryer.”

“Oh shit.”

“Stop saying that.”

Gillian holds her plaid shirt in her hand—presumably she was fetching it from the hook on the door when Caroline had barged in. “What’d you say to him?”

“We were just chatting, and I wanted to get him into the kitchen, then he heard the hairdryer and said, ‘oh, you have company,’ and I just said ‘yes’ like a bloody idiot because I didn’t know what else to say.” Caroline drags a hand over her face. “If he hadn’t just come from Jennifer’s I could have lied and said it was her, I suppose—would’ve been a stretch, I guess, and oh, I’d be indebted to that woman forever because she’d have to cover for me, and she’d probably blackmail me into performing horrid sex acts or getting her youngest into the school and oh Christ never mind, never mind.”

Gillian frowns. “Who’s Jennifer?”

“Fake Hippie Nigella Lawson.”

“Oh, so she  _does_  have a name.”

“Seriously, I do not have time for you to be jealous right now.”

Sullenly Gillian shrugs on the plaid over her t-shirt. “I’m not jealous.”

Caroline shoots her a  _girl, please_  look.

“I am  _not._ ” Gillian sneers, rakes a hand through her uncombed hair. “You should’ve just told him it was me.”

“Are you mad?”

“No. You should’ve said I was here taking a shower because the water pipes are busted out at the farm, something like that.”

Caroline props her chin in her hand. “I had thought of something like that, but—of course you would come up with a more convincing lie.”

“Now what does that mean?” Gillian tilts her head in that particularly dangerous,  _I’m-about-to-go-mental-on-you_  fashion that she has.

Unsurprisingly, Caroline is so absorbed in her current dilemma that she misses the warning sign. “Just that you’re more experienced in lying, you know, working yourself out of these mucky situations—”

Gillian steps closer to her and, quite unexpectedly, flicks the tip of middle finger at the side of Caroline’s head, causing a blunt, painful _thwack_  right above an eyebrow.

“Ow!” Caroline screeches. She touches the spot. “That really hurt.”

“I’m trying to be helpful, you knob, and you’re saying shit to me.”

“Seriously, I’ve seen boys do this to each other at the school and I had _no idea_  it was this painful—”

“Are you done now? Because I’d like to know which window you want me to jump out of.”

Caroline cannot say anything, cannot even think. Tears are not forthcoming, thank God, but she is trapped and furious at the continued high price of pleasure. How long can she do this? Why does she keep doing this? Her evident misery prompts a gentler touch from Gillian, who strokes her hair, and Caroline surrenders to comfort. She presses her face into Gillian’s torso, breathes into her shirt—o glorious luscious field of green—and in one sharp inhalation of her scent remembers exactly why she is doing this, is shakily reacquainted with loneliness, compulsion, desire, the dangerous approximation of love, the taunting reminder of what she once had.

“I don’t know what to do.” She hooks a finger through a belt loop of Gillian’s jeans.

“Don’t have to do anything,” Gillian replies.

Curious, Caroline pulls back and looks up at her.

“You’re a grown bloody woman. This is your home and you’ve the right to sleep with whoever you want here or anywhere else for that matter, and you don’t own anyone an explanation. Not even your son. He doesn’t need to know everything, you know. It’s none of his business. It doesn’t affect him. You’re the head bitch here too. What you say—or don’t say—goes.”

Caroline straightens hopefully. “Very good points.”

“Have my moments.” Gillian pauses. “Where is he now? Downstairs?”

“Yeah.”

“Distract him for about five minutes. Keep him in the kitchen. All I need to get out the door.”

“Really?” Caroline frowns. “You can get out that quickly?”

“Yeah. No worries. I’m really stealthy.” She cradles Caroline’s face in her hands and enunciates with a slow, recitative sexiness, as if she were a Yorkshire Barry White, “I’m like a—fucking—ninja—panther.”

“Really?” Caroline is one part callously skeptical, one part ridiculously swayed—as she usually is with Gillian.

In response Gillian kisses her.

She’s glad she sitting down, because the kiss is so perfectly gentle and passionate, reassuring and arousing, as swoon-worthy and inspirational as the hero’s kiss at the train station before he goes off to war. It is the Churchill of kisses. They will win the war! Muckiness will prevail! Surely Gillian would know the proper film to reference. But Christ in heaven, what knobhead in the long line of knobheads she’s been with taught her to kiss like  _this_?

“Fucking amazing,” Caroline breathes.

“That’s more like it.”

“But seriously.” Heavy-lidded with renewed ardor, she must counteract the delirious effect with sarcasm to keep her head. “Why do I fear the reality will be less ninja panther and more drunken kitten?”  

With a long-suffering sigh and a roll of her eyes, Gillian releases her. “Twat.”

“Don’t forget to put your shoes on,” Caroline nags as she heads for the door.

“Details, details.”

“Godspeed, ninja turtle.”

Without a glance back, Gillian flips her off and slips out the door.

Thirty seconds later Caroline is dashing—insofar as her creaky knees will permit—down the stairs and gliding as elegantly as she can manage into the kitchen. Brooding, William slouches over the table, thumb twitching over his mobile. She knows that recently he had a quarrel with his girlfriend, something to do with a social outing involving a potential rival for her affections. She could bring that up, but it seems too cruel a diversion. Instead she merely stands over him, playing with his hair as he scrolls through Instagram and she hopes fervently not to see nude or compromising photos of any of his friends.

Then she catches a scent of something sharp, bitter, and pungent—the scent of something she hasn’t bothered with since she herself was at Oxford. The familiar, comforting mantle of self-righteousness settles upon her shoulders, and she enunciates with barely contained fury: “Oh my God.”

Alarmed, William looks up; the alarming expanse of his pupils confirms everything.

“Were you smoking weed?”

His thumb jerks over the phone screen, making Instagram go crazy. “What? No.”

“Come on, Will. I can smell it. Did you think I would  _not_  notice? Me, of all people?”

“No,” he insists.

“Come on.”

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me about it. That’s  _worse,_ okay? You know that’s worse.”

“No.”

He leaves her with no alternative but the Celia Dawson Glare of Maternal Hypnosis.

William crumbles. “All right. It was just a spliff. Just had a little. I swear. Dylan smoked most of it. And that’s why he was fighting with his mum—God, he’s such an idiot sometimes.”

“She caught you two at it?”

“No,” he replies, drawling out a confessional moan. “He took it from Jennifer’s stash.”

“And you wanted to set me up with this woman. Does she have a bloody meth lab too?”

“Well, maybe you’d benefit from—” William stops short at another frightening Celia-like glower. “I’m sorry. I’ve only done it a couple times, and like, half the time I don’t even feel anything at all, except that I’m  _so_  hungry afterwards. It’s really frustrating.” He goes on the offensive. “I mean, are you going to tell me you never—”

“Okay, fine, yes, I did. But I expected this kind of shit from Lawrence, not you.” She seizes a bottle of wine even though she realizes that knocking a few back might diminish the effectiveness of any anti-drug tirade—and she can see from William’s withering smirk that he is thinking the same thing. It’s always one drug for another; this is a cardinal rule of life. Whether it’s wine or shagging your stepsister, it’s all good. Isn’t it? “Wait a minute,” she muses aloud—and melodramatically points in a _j’accuse_  fashion. “That’s it—you’re acting out! This is your rebellion! You’ve never acted out before—well, not since you threw sautéed spinach at me when you were five. So you’re well overdue for one! Right, then! Crisis averted, until you need an intervention.” She congratulates herself with a generous swig of wine.

“I really don’t understand you at all,” William says, echoing what Gillian says to her on a fairly regular basis. She knows she should be troubled by her apparent inscrutability to so many people closer to her, but at the same time rather enjoys the consistency of it all.

“Look, as long as you’re not doing any other kind of drug—it’s all downhill from there, you start getting into serious problems. And do it in moderation. Or like, on extremely rare occasions, like the arrival of a comet—”

“—or you being out of wine?” William retorts.

“Very funny.”

“Yeah. I know I shouldn’t joke about such serious matters.”

“I just don’t want you to end up some doped-up idiot working at a café the rest of your life wearing an anorak and with dreadlocks or something—you know how I—”

“—feel about dreadlocks, I know.” He slouches into the table even further. “Are you really angry? Don’t be angry.”

“No. I can never be angry with you for long.”

“Then,” he asks hopefully, “you’ll still make me an omelet?”

“I will still make you an omelet,” she replies in tones of Churchill-like gravitas.

She makes it in record time, burning a finger on the pan, all nervous energy channeled into the act of cooking as if she’s on a competitive cooking show awaiting a dire, foul-mouthed judgment from Gordon Ramsey. The second she sits the finished product in front of William he tears into it. As he eats, she takes the opportunity to confirm Gillian’s great escape by going into stealthy ninja mode herself. She prowls as a thief in her own home, looking for the grand jewel that’s already gone, and finds herself standing in the empty bedroom, sucking at her stinging fingertip, and staring at a seascape of pitched waves and coursing inlets across the bed, sculpted through the medium of human bodies writhing in sheets. In this vast imagined space she is situated somewhere between guilty relief and troubling sadness.

Downstairs William is done eating and is now twirling his way through Facebook. “Gran is getting tipsy,” he reports. “She’s taking all these weird shaky photos of light fixtures and candles at the restaurant. God, she even took a photo of a hobo earlier.” He frowns. “Oh wait. That’s Harry.”

Amazed, Caroline stares at the empty plate. “Good God.”

“It was great. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She sits at the table across from him, nervously creating a gyroscope of wine as she rapidly moves the glass back and forth.

He turns off the mobile. “Where’s Lawrence?”

“Overnighting at his boyfriend’s.” With William alone, she jokes a lot about Lawrence’s devotion to Angus.

“Do you really think he’s gay?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even think he knows what he is.”

“There is a gay gene, you know.”

Caroline smiles. “Are you afraid of having it?”

William giggles nervously. “No. I don’t think I am—I mean, I really like girls, but I don’t, you know, obsess about it or anything.” He plays with his fork and nervously changes the topic. “You know, you don’t need to worry about the dope thing. I’m really rubbish at it. Kept coughing the whole time.”

“For what it’s worth—I did too.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“I feel better now. Dylan kept telling me how uncool it was.”

“It’s very uncool of him to steal from his mother. If you start nicking my cabernet you’ll be in deep shit.”

William smiles. “No worries.”

The silence between them stretches beyond seconds into a minute. She finds it comforting, relieving, but sees it has no such effect on him; he watches her carefully, calmly, waiting for the right moment to ask the question he’s wanted to ask since he heard the hair dryer. “So,” he begins.

She hums.

“I guess—you aren’t going to tell me who was upstairs earlier?”

Caroline shakes her head. She is ready, gearing for a counterattack of some sort while secretly amazed that she’s lived to see the day where she is taking advice on anything—with the possible exception of sheep, beer, or pizza—from Gillian Greenwood.

But William’s response turns out to be what she least expects: Acceptance. He shrugs—well, it’s more a spastic twitch of his shoulders, but she chooses to interpret it as nonchalance. “All right.”

“Really?” Caroline asks, surprised.

He nods. “Yeah. Of course.” He holds her gaze for a moment too long before abruptly looking down at his plate and she realizes that he knows. He’s always been an open book to her, and vice versa. She had not been surprised when he told her that he knew about her and Kate; among the gifts of his intellect and character included keen perceptiveness, silent observation, fortuitous memory. Now she sees in his face that somehow he has gleaned the truth of what she is doing with Gillian.

“Shit.” Her hand trembles. She pinches the stem of the wineglass, wants to break it, but decides otherwise. “You know.”

He blushes, cannot look at her. “Yeah.”

“How?” Was it revealed in a look, a touch?

William manages to compose himself for his Sherlock moment. “I recognized her jacket on the floor in the hallway when I came home.”

It is all Caroline can do not to bang her head on the table.

“I thought it was weird, ’cause Gillian didn’t seem to be around, and the Land Rover wasn’t in the driveway but then—the hair dryer—and it all came together.” He adds softly, “It made sense.” He seems troubled by this, but shakes it off with a barely perceptible twitch of his head. “Is she gone now?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re really—”

She nods.

“I didn’t know she liked women, like that.”

“That makes two of us.”

“So. What—are you, like, dating or—”

“No. It’s not like that.”

“Okay.” He pauses, takes it in, while nervously tapping his mobile. “Well. What is it, then? If I may ask.”

“I’m not sure I can find words at the moment.” Or ever, she wants to add.

William decides to speculate. “Is it, like, a rebound kind of thing?”

Caroline hedges. “I guess you could say that. It’s—just something that happened between us. William, it’s really nothing.”

“Mum.” William straightens and gives her a slightly condescending look that reminds her she should be the parent and he the child. “Are you really quoting the Smiths at me?”

She pinches her brow. Fucking Gillian. “Not deliberately so, but it does fit the occasion.”

“How long?”

She prays the interrogation ends soon. “Not long. A few weeks.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I guess—I’m just surprised.” He admits, “I don’t know what to think, really.”

“Will,” she says. “Don’t tell anyone. Please. It would just upset and confuse everyone. It’s not, it’s not a permanent thing. In fact, I’ve been thinking about stopping it, breaking it off—” While disingenuous, it’s technically true; every time they’ve slept together, she’s thought it would be the last, she’s thought herself capable of summoning up the strength to end it. And every time she’s been wrong. Perhaps this will prove the impetus to bring about that ending.

William protests gently, “ _I’m_  not upset. Or confused.”

“Really? I’m glad that if anyone found out, it was you.”

“Yeah. But I’ve got to tell you, Mum.”

“What?”

He slumps forward and cradles himself in such a knot of slender limbs, knobby wrists, and an oversized argyle sweater—the sleeves even longer than usual because he pulls at them so frequently—that he resembles a cubist painting. “This has been more mind-blowing than weed.”

“So you’re  _not_  okay.”

“I  _am_  okay,” he insists. “And I won’t tell anyone. I promise. I mean, you’re entitled to your own, you know, private life and all that. I guess it just seems weird because it seems, you know, almost like incest, and Gillian is so different from you—”

“It’s not incest. You know that.”

“I know. Just sort of. Which makes it kind of cool—oh God, it’s  _weird_ that I think that!”

“Maybe we should discuss this tomorrow morning, when you are not in an altered state.”

“No,” he moans. “That will give you time to prepare a speech. Like the time you did the birth control speech and the chart—”

“Tell me that  _wasn’t_  helpful to you.”

“Lawrence had nightmares about fallopian tubes.”

Caroline harrumphs.

“Mum, it’s fine. Honest. I don’t think any less of you in any way. Or Gillian, for that matter.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

William spends the next half hour assuring her that indeed, it’s fine, he’s fine, she’s fine, Gillian’s fine, and then finally throws in that he’s made up with his girlfriend, so all is indeed truly right with the world.

“Let’s hug it out,” he says before they go to bed.

“Are you still high?” she asks.

“No, I just love you.”

That a skinny-limbed embrace composed of argyle and pot smoke could prove so comforting and reassuring is something Caroline never imagined.

The next day at school, in the tomblike silence of her office during an afternoon study period, she decides to call Gillian and end it. A face-to-face would be more proper, and the right thing to do. Currently, however, the permeability of each and every boundary between them is cause for some distance, and given the way people terminate relationships these days, even those of the most casual kind, a telephone breakup seems almost quaint. Perhaps some sort of greeting or occasion card even exists for these situations. That would be even more ideal for the cowardly:  _I’m sorry I won’t get to see you naked again._  Or:  _Thanks for going down on me so often, you were surprisingly top notch at that._

On the mobile, Gillian sounds distracted. “What’s up?” A susurrus of distance fills Caroline’s ear—possibly the wind whipping around outside, suggesting that Gillian is at the farm. She’s not sure; she can never keep track of Gillian’s work schedule.

“He knows,” she says.

“What?”

“William knows.”

After a rather long pause, Gillian finally says, “Shit.” She sighs. “Did you tell him?”

“He saw your coat in the hallway.”

“Shit.” This time, there’s real anger instead of resignation behind the expletive, and it only escalates as she continues. “I’m so  _bloody fucking stupid._ ”

“It’s not your fault—it’s not like I thought of it either.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“Is he okay—I mean, is he upset?”

“No. Surprised, more than anything. As usual, he acts more grown up than the adults who surround him.” Caroline pauses. “He’s okay. He won’t say anything. And if there’s one person in this family who can keep his mouth shut, it’s William.”

“Yeah.”

“But this has brought it all to a head. We need to stop.”

Another wind-filled pause.

“It’s obvious now—it’s just seems a matter of time before this really blows up in our faces.”

Gillian retains her silence.

For Caroline, however, it all comes out in a rush. “It’s been great and I like you and you made me feel so good and, and I felt—desired, really desired, like for the first time in a long while.” Embarrassed and troubled by the admission, she stops and worries that she might burst out into singing  _you make me feel like a natural woman._  Because the lyric somehow hits at the heart of it. Everything had seemed so different with Kate—where she felt so loved and valued that sex and desire seemed almost ancillary. Why? There were moments when she could not believe such an astonishingly beautiful woman as Kate even gave her the time of day; at times their relationship almost seemed unreal. Perhaps, with time, that would have changed; now, she will never know.

In contrast Gillian seems real, almost disturbingly so. A primordial element, unalterable, unchangeable by anyone or anything. “I wish,” Caroline begins, plowing through the hitch in her voice, “I wish—things could be different, but you know it can’t, you know it.” Say something, she thinks. Say anything.

“Yeah,” Gillian is barely audible. “All right.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Gillian’s voice gains certainty and strength. “Yeah. It’s all right. It’s fine.”

“Do we need to talk?”

“We are talking.”

“No, I mean in person.”

“Yeah. No. I mean, no.” Gillian sighs. “Let’s just leave it. All right? It’ll be okay. I’m not—I’m never good at stuff like that. And, and, I mean, if I need to talk, I’ll ring you, and you—you do the same, yeah? But we’re good.” Gillian repeats it firmly: “We’re good.”

The more Gillian affirms it, the less certain she feels. “We are?”

“We are.”

With a promise that they’ll talk again soon, Gillian rings off.

Caroline places both her mobile and her head on the desk. The desk blotter still smells of tea spilled on it nearly a week ago. The sky is ridiculously bright and as artificial as a paint chip, a surreal saturation selected by an overeager interior designer. She’s not sure how long she stays like this but at the sound of Beverly’s voice outside her office door she comes to life, and the primary image she has always had of herself—a marionette controlled by duty and expectation—remains intact.


	9. blood, gin, and the devil, or: Gertrude was head bitch of Paris

 

On Friday Caroline arrives home from a half day at the school, ready and unwilling to play chauffer to her mother and Alan; that afterward she will have time to herself is a reward in itself. She tosses keys on the kitchen table, fumbles with the mail, goes to the loo. She assumes she has time to change into something casual but her mother arrives early and brings with her, as usual, the gift that always gives: her indelibly rigid agenda.

No sooner has Celia shut the front door behind her: “Are you ready?”

“Lovely to see you too.”

“Sorry, dear. I’m just excited.”

“We don’t have to leave for another half hour. Can I just—” Caroline heads for the stairs.

“Well, Gillian’s here,” Celia interrupts, “and she might get _surly_ if we have to wait around much longer.”

At the mention of Gillian’s name, she half-turns and, heel catching on the edge of a hall carpet, swoons against the ever-chivalrous wall, which keeps her upright and clinging to a scrap of dignity.

“I think you may need glasses full-time, dear.”

“Gillian’s here?” Caroline asks the wall. She straightens, tugs at her skirt, touches her hair, realizes what she’s doing, and immediately stops.

“Yes, just arrived a few minutes ago, right after you.”

She tries for curious and not irritated: “She said she wasn’t going to come.”

“Oh, something happened on the farm—one of the sheep died.” Celia sighs and, like a child forced to declaim the Aeneid, reels off the morning’s activity. “We woke up, had a lovely breakfast, and then Alan called her to say goodbye and she told him what happened: Stillborn lamb and a ewe dead. She seemed upset, or so he thought—when _I_ spoke with her she sounded _fine_ —so he asked her to come over and ride with us.”

Caroline looks out the window. Sure enough, Alan and Gillian stand in the driveway and Gillian, God damn her to eternal flaming pits of hell, is wearing those goddamned aviator sunglasses that look so inexplicably, entrancingly sexy on her and prompting Caroline’s superego to issue a very stern memorandum to a key part of her body: _Ovaries, please disregard._ But she grows concerned as she observes Gillian—head bowed and hands on hips, father gently squeezing her arm—and as her spine stiffens a strange, tiny wellspring of grief bubbles within.

“Oh my God,” Caroline wails. “ _Did Monica Vitti die?_ ”

Bewildered at Caroline’s sudden and intense interest in a now-obscure Italian film actress, Celia blinks helplessly and chalks up the bizarre outburst to some mysterious gay thing because these days she attributes anything remotely odd or puzzling about her daughter’s behavior to latent lesbianism and while she is partially correct, it is not quite the mysterious gay thing she imagines. She responds to Caroline with the indulgent tone of a nurse on a mental ward. “Well I think she died several years ago, dear.”

“I don’t mean the actress!” Caroline gestures angrily, waving her arm in the general direction of Alan and Gillian. “I mean the sheep. Gillian’s sheep!”

Now Celia cannot disguise her concern and looks at Caroline as if she’s gone completely mad.

“ _Gillian has a ewe named Monica Vitti._ ”

“Oh.”

“Was it her?”

“Bit of a fancy ewe, then? With attitude? That’s how Alan described her.”

Caroline cannot believe how upset she feels about this, the death of her ovine counterpart. Is it a sign from the cruel universe? “Yes! That’s her.”

Celia blinks. “Ah, that’s the one then. All I know is that some ewe died, lost her babe in the process, poor thing. Alan said it was a right bloody mess.” She sighs, shakes her head. “But Good Lord. She called it Monica Vitti?”

Caroline decides now is not the time to mention Bernardo Bertolucci the ram.

“That girl is so peculiar!”

Additionally, Caroline opts not to remind Celia that Gillian is a fortysomething woman.

 “Ah, well.” Celia clasps both hands together in anticipation. “Shall we go?”

“But I wanted to change clothes.”

“You look lovely.”

“I don’t want to look lovely. I want to be comfortable.”

“Caroline, please. The whole day has been nerve-wracking enough, with all this livestock drama. And _Gillian_ —she has blood on her jacket and that combined with those silly sunglasses, well, she looks like an escaped felon. We may be _pulled over by the police._ Can we just go before some other tragedy befalls us all?”

“‘Can we just go?’” Caroline mocks in a sneery falsetto. She yanks open the door. “Fine.”

“God, you’re surly today too. I don’t know how Alan and I will put up with you two along the way.”

Outside Gillian is awkwardly lugging a suitcase out of the guesthouse; why she’s carrying it instead of rolling it on its wheels is only a mystery when one fails to take into account her endless propensity for making her own life difficult. When she catches sight of Caroline she stumbles just a bit and Alan dashes forward to help.

“Knew it was too heavy,” he grumbles. He shoots an accusatory look at Celia, who is too busy checking a weather forecast on her mobile to notice.

Gillian is perfunctory. “It’s all right.”

Without thinking Caroline intercepts. She seizes the suitcase, opens the Cherokee’s boot, and tosses it in.

“Bloody showoff.” Caught between admiration and irritation, Gillian folds her arms and leans against the Jeep as if she owns it. The magical aviators endow her with a certain cockiness, a swaggering indolence that Caroline typically loathes in the male of the species but in this moment and in this particular woman once again forces a petition to her nether regions to _shut it the fuck down already._

“We’ve been outmuscled, lass,” Alan deadpans. “No shame in it.”

Celia recites the weather report to everyone before climbing in the front seat. Alan continues his complaint about the fat suitcase—“How are we to carry in London?”—and gets in the back.

Caroline shuts the boot. “I’m sorry,” she blurts to Gillian.

“Why? I’m really fine with you being all butch and throwing around luggage, no worries. Maybe I’ll hire you when I bale hay.”

“No.” Caroline stares at the alleged blood smear along the sleeve of Gillian’s jacket and she feels Gillian noticing her noticing it—her arm jerks like the flank of a sheep throwing off flies. The stain is dark on dark, like an oil slick on a stormy puddle, and could be anything from tractor grease to coffee. She imagines blood on Gillian’s hands—the blood of an animal, the blood of a man—and blinks several times to regain herself. “I mean about Monica.”

“Oh.” Gillian’s bravado dissipates. She turns her aviator’ed glance downward.

“What happened?”

“Looks like toxemia.” Gillian touches the bridge of the sunglasses and Caroline wishes that she would take them off, so that she could gauge her mood more accurately. But, she realizes, that is exactly why Gillian keeps them on. “Came on fast. Real fast. She wasn’t showing any symptoms— that’s what makes it so _bloody_ frustrating.” She shrugs helplessly. “Vet thinks so too. But there is one thing I am sure about.”

“What?”

She gives Caroline that quick, dangerous smile. “I have shit luck.”

The drive to Halifax is subdued. Alan sits in the back with Gillian, who falls asleep against her father’s shoulder for a while. Routine glances in the rear view mirror confirm Gillian, sunglasses slightly askew, slack-mouthed and probably drooling into Alan’s natty new sportcoat, and Alan occasionally gazing at her tenderly. Once again it appears they are on good terms.

As they get closer to Halifax, traffic clots the highway. Celia grows agitated. Gillian wakes up and Caroline watches her in the rearview mirror—straightening the sunglasses, rubbing her neck, staring inscrutably into the ever-tightening knot of cars.

Celia too glares at the impending auto apocalypse, hysterically grim as if she were crewmember on a sinking ship requiring courage slapped into her by the captain. “We’re going to miss the train.”

“You’re not going to miss the train,” Caroline says, thankful that she has a steering wheel to strangle in lieu of her mother’s neck.

Gillian attempts lightening the mood. “Can’t this fancy Jeep go sailing in the air?”

“Like _Chitty Chitty Bang Bang_!” Alan says.

“If you lot back there start singing, you’re done for,” Celia says.

“Was not going to sing—” Alan begins.

“Although that could still happen,” Gillian threatens ominously.

“—but simply say that when our Gillian was little, she tried to build a flying car! Do you remember, love?”

“Oh yeah,” Gillian smiles wistfully and Caroline, witnessing this with a flickering glance into the rearview mirror again, tries not to veer into another lane. “My little Mercedes Benz. I attached a battery and a motor, and these wings to her side—fashioned ‘em out of old planks of wood. Still remember the first time I drove her. I was so excited the motor actually ran I didn’t even care that it couldn’t fly.” She gazes out the window. “Didn’t last long though.”

There is a moment of silence for youthful invention.

“She hit the postman with it,” Alan adds by way of conclusion.

Gillian provides the postscript: “He wasn’t _seriously_ injured.”

“Aye. But as result we had to retire her, alas.”

Celia turns around, looks askance at Gillian while dictating a rather obvious note to self: _Never ride in a motor vehicle with her driving ever again._

“This explains so much about how you drive today,” Caroline says.

From the backseat, Gillian flips her off and this, in the currency of their relationship, seems an invaluable affirmation that things are right between them.

“I saw that,” Caroline says with mock sternness.

Gillian smiles wryly. “Good.”

Celia’s patience runs out. “All of you settle down, because we are going miss the effing train!”

They do not miss the effing train. Caroline even finds a parking spot near the station, and is especially proud of this. In the station the parents are trundled off with much ado and farewells, and Caroline sprints through predictable emotions as quickly as possible to avoid the actual experience of feeling them: irritation, relief, anxiety, guilt, regret, even love, as if her mother were boarding some one-way train to heaven (or purgatory) and she had to distill their forty-odd years of relations into some sort of all-encompassing, smothering long goodbye.

When the train pulls away she’s left on the platform with strangers and Gillian, who finally removes her sunglasses and rubs her eyes. Caroline had expected to feel suddenly tense and awkward when alone with her. Instead, she marvels at the sense of equanimity that settles over her. Or is that feeling of ease simply because her mother is on a train heading far enough away so that the magnetic, maternal pull of Celia’s discontent is blessedly, if only temporarily, broken?

Not surprisingly Gillian looks tired, but is still laughing—as Caroline had hoped—by some last-moment shenanigans. “Nice timing there,” she says. “You yelling at your mum to take her anti-diarrhea pills—right in front of the conductor.”

“It was truly petty, wasn’t it?” Caroline is pleased.

“It was, and completely brilliant.”

A contented sigh. “Why do I feel—”

“—like you fancy a drink?”

Fearful of the possibility that they would end up in bed again, Caroline had hesitated in even suggesting it. But the advantage in actually going round to a pub—not drinking at her place or the farmhouse—would, she thinks, greatly diminish the prospect. She also thinks that they could _talk about it_ if need be, although she suspects that Gillian would rather hack off a limb or admit that there was artistic merit in the third _Godfather_ film.

And let’s be honest, Caroline says to herself, you don’t want to talk about _it_ either. She just wants company, in particular, the company of this woman. “You’re a mind-reader,” she says.

“No. You always fancy a drink.” Before Caroline can get defensive, she is disarmed by Gillian’s flashing grin. “I do too.”

“I’d suggest someplace around here, but I don’t know this part of town.”

 “Ah.” With relish Gillian rubs her hands together. “I happen to know just the place.”

“You would, I imagine.”

“Oh boy.” Gillian laughs sardonically, shakes her head. “Here it comes. You think I know about every bloody pub and bar in Yorkshire because I’ve picked up men in every single bloody one. Right?”

“Actually, no.” Caroline pulls on a pair of gloves. “I was just implying you’re a massive drunk.”

“Well.” Gillian rolls her shoulders. “That’s all right then.”

Caroline laughs.

 The drinking spot in question is a bar within an ancient, dated hotel called the Belgravia. Both bar and hotel represent those days of empire, opulence, fanfare—the England that Caroline’s generation only heard about and now resides in faded memory and ruinous buildings: Threadbare brocades, tatty silk tassels, rooms as richly red as hollowed-out hearts and gleaming dark with stents of mahogany wood. Dingy old mirrors framed in dull bronze and flecked with dark spots. The air, gauzy with imaginary smoke and intangible dust motes—because no one is smoking and no one has dusted for months, it seems, if ever—rolls through the bar and thickens in sunlight as if some spectrogram documents cigar smoke that has been trapped, ghostlike, in the bar for the past hundred years.

They move past the bar and the handful of aging drinkers who cling to it as polyps in a colon, past an American couple with expensive-looking, fancy hiking gear who pester the young bartender for directions to a park, toward the booths that line the wall. The booths with their dried-blood upholstery are all empty and Gillian commandeers the largest one in the corner. When the barkeep is done with the Americans, he comes over and takes their order. Mindful of driving, Caroline orders vermouth and soda; to her surprise, however, Gillian doesn’t order a pint or a glass of wine but a tumbler of gin and tonic—a staggeringly obvious indicator of intent, namely that of getting well and truly pissed.

When the drinks arrive, Caroline rattles the ice in her vermouth—too much of it in her fussy opinion—as if it were a saber and thinks that perhaps this was not the greatest idea. She nearly downs half of it out of sheer nerves before furiously chastising herself— _nurse it, you bloody idiot_ —and then sighs as she glances around. “Christ, this is depressing.”

“I know.” Pleased, Gillian leans back. “Innit great?”

Caroline makes a face.

“It’s got character. Great gloomy fucking character.” Gillian sips her drink. “It’s like another world. Like it should be in a movie. God, I’d be surprised if they haven’t filmed _something_ here.”

“How on earth did you become aware of this relic?”

“Dad’s friend Maurice. You remember?”

“Of course.”

“He brought me here once.” She shoots Caroline a steely look. “Not what you think. See, he was trying to get me to go on to university. He was a good man. Smart, and he knew so much about this bloody town he could’ve recited to you all the businesses on this block alone over the past fifty years or whatever. Anyway, mum and dad were in an uproar ’cause of the school thing, and, well, I always kinda looked up to him and they thought he’d persuade me to change my mind. So he took me here—fancy place, as kind of a special treat, but he also wanted to treat me like an adult, like a mate—you know how you take a friend out for a pint and try to talk sense into ’em when they’re about to be stupid.”  A bitter smile tightens her mouth. “Didn’t work.” She takes a healthy swig of gin. “I was too set on Eddie, on farming.” Then she swipes at her mouth with the back of her hand. “I was wrong. Couldn’t help but think that as I looked at her lying there yesterday. Monica. And the stillborn.  Just lying there dead, sinking in the mud.” Head bowed, Gillian hunches forward, hands cuffing the back of her neck.  “‘All earth for a body,’” she says.

The lyrical phrase sends Caroline’s spine tingling with recognition. “You’re quoting something—”

“Ted Hughes.”

Caroline tries—and fails—to mask her surprise. “You’ve read Ted Hughes.”

“I see I’ve impressed you, Mrs. Elliot.”

“Oh Christ. Stop with that. Here, I’ll tell you something—you’re the first to know. I’m going to ditch the old married name. Goodbye Mrs. Elliot, hello, Ms. Dawson.”

“Good for you.” Gillian raises her glass in a toast. “I like it better.”

“Thanks.” Curious, she prompts: “You never went back to yours.”

Gillian tilts the tumbler as if it were a snow globe; the cascade of glittering ice peaking through the turbulent lake of gin tells no story. “Penance,” she finally says.

They drink in silence for several minutes. The Americans and their backpacks depart for the wild hills. Caroline wonders if tomorrow morning she’ll see a news report about missing hikers.

“So.” Gillian tires of the quiet. “You read that poem?”

“I might have—that’s why it rung a bit of a bell. Honestly don’t recall. I’ve studiously avoided poetry, especially anything that touches upon our dear old native land, for many, many years now.”

“Even though you were married to a writer.”

“Precisely.”

“I know Hughes was kind of a shit with women. But I still like the poems. Most of ’em, anyway. He’s not sentimental about the land—Yorkshire. Or the people. I like that. He could sum up the people of this bloody place in just a line, you know? Like—” She squints, hand slicing through air, and the quote falls ripe from the tree of memory. “Like, ‘a far veiled gaze of / homicidal appraisal.’” She fixes Caroline with a look that demands understanding. “You know it, don’t you? That flinty fucking look? You know what he’s talking about?”

“Know it?” Caroline sips vermouth. “I have it.”

Gillian bursts into laughter. Gradations of pleasure flit across her face, like shadows that fall with the slow, stately removal of a mask—slow because Gillian can be so cautious to reveal herself at the most vulnerable of moments, even while fucking, and stately because she knows she has power and so frequently chooses to let it deliciously slip away. Because she knows it doesn’t matter. It is the most fleeting and mutable thing of life. Quickly lost when least expected, quickly regained at a terrible price. And at this moment the equanimity that Caroline thought she had attained earlier slips away as Gillian reveals more of herself, and it is an epiphany: Her vulnerability is her power.

“We’re a cussed people, we are,” Gillian is saying. “Cussed and cursed.” Already she’s dangerously close to finishing her drink. “Yeah. You’ve got that look all right. All that toff bullshit don’t cover it up completely. And I have it.” Again she stares unfocused into the pessimist’s till of an ice-laden glass. “And Eddie had it. God.” This time the memory that besieges her is unwelcome. “I remember the first time we had a lamb—well, one of our ewes had the lamb, obviously. Weren’t coming out right. Eddie practically had to cut it out—” She stops at the wince on Caroline’s face, and shakes her head. “Jesus. First time I ever saw anything like that up close. Blood everywhere. Worse than last night. I nearly threw up all over the place but I knew he’d go off on me if I did, so I was all, ‘excuse me, please’ like I was in class or something, like it was nothing, and I walked very, very slowly, all casual like, back into the house. And then I chucked up in the sink.” Her face creases into an exaggerated frown as she sighs. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to go on like that. Just thought lately that—you know, I was really turning a corner with the farm—new life in both senses.”

“It’s all right,” Caroline says gently. “I don’t mind.”

“Look.” Gillian shakes a finger at her and downs the dregs of the gin and tonic. “Let me get another drink and then you can bitch at me about your work. It’s only fair.”

“I don’t have anything to bitch about.”

“Bullshit.”

It seems churlish to complain about Beverly’s Radar O’Reilly-like perfection. “My laundry list of grievances over Michael Bloody Dobson pales in comparison to dead sheep.”

“When I come back you tell me all about this knobhead.” She makes for the bar. Even though she can’t hear a word they’re saying, Caroline can tell that Gillian is flirting mightily with the bartender, who is young and skinny, dark and awkward but carefully observant as many of his kind are, ready to pounce on a morsel of information. But he is a vulture humbled in the presence of a cougar. She smiles. He laughs. Like a summer storm, a frisson of jealousy passes. What does she care? Gillian is free to do as she wishes. As is she. New life and all that. Caroline knocks back a generous mouthful of soda and vermouth.

Gillian returns with a free gin and tonic: mission accomplished. With some prodding Caroline does go on at length, first about the testing and standards board, then about Michael Bloody Dobson—his treachery, his pretenses at friendship with Kate, his efforts at undermining her, his cheap suits. “Every little bloody thing about him annoys me. I don’t even like the way he combs his hair—in fact, sometimes I’m not even certain he _does_ comb his hair.”

“There you go, sounding all snotty bitch again.”

 “No, it’s not that. I can’t help that I notice things. I’m detail-oriented.”

“Tell me then,” Gillian says, “if you’ve noticed that wankpot at the bar making eyes at you.”

Shortly after Gillian obtained her second round a moneyed-but-casual bloke came in: Even from a distance Caroline noted the deft hand of a tailor on the trousers, the cuffs of the shirt, the cashmere sweater—everything at a perfect length and in an elegant, flattering cut. He’s fair, balding, and resembles a younger, benevolent Charles Dance. Which she instantaneously find suspicious—when was Charles Dance _ever_ benevolent?

Instead of positing this pressing cultural query aloud to the film maven, she wearily says to Gillian, “No one is making eyes at me. He’s looking at you.”

“No he’s not.”

“Yes he is.”

“No he’s not.”

“Yes he is.”

“No he’s not.” To terminate their childish argument Gillian slams her glass down and adds, in a whisper of mock horror, “And his fucking trousers are pleated!” 

Caroline giggles and then realizes this might only encourage this man—if indeed he is interested in her. “Will you shut up?”

“Your glass is empty—

“Oh shit. I didn’t mean to drink that down so quickly.”

“You’re a couple behind me anyway.”

“Are you up to your third already?”

“All that shit about the standards testing was _really boring._ Anyway, as I was saying, your glass is empty and I predict in five minutes he’s going to saunter over with a drink for you.”

It’s more like two minutes: He strolls over and with an annoying flourish sits a fresh vermouth and soda in front of Caroline. He introduces himself as Philip.

“Oooh, nice,” Gillian coos. “Like Prince Philip.”

Philip chuckles magnanimously, as if humoring the stroppy, dopey wingman of the target of his romantic campaign is a great service rendered for the male population of the country. “That’s the one.” He smiles at Caroline. “And may I ask—”

“I’m Gertrude,” Caroline replies and, with a regal wave at Gillian, adds, “this is Alice.”

“I see.” Although he’s twigged that the names are not genuine, the Sapphic allusion goes right over his delicately balding head.

Gillian, however, gets it—and is disappointed. “Why am I Alice?”

“Because Gertrude was head bitch of Paris,” Caroline retorts. She’s about to take a sip of the drink when she remembers the strange man hovering above them. “Oh, thanks for the drink, nice meeting you. Cheers.”

Resigned to handmaiden status, Gillian shrugs. Philip smiles uncertainly; his watery blue eyes remain focused on Caroline. “Well,” he says, “perhaps you’ll tell me your real name later. But—may I sit with you? Just for a moment?”

As Caroline says “no” Gillian says, “why the fuck not.” Caroline shoots what she hopes is a definitively Yorkshire gaze of homicidal appraisal at Gillian. She can’t possibly fancy this wankpot herself, can she? Caroline understood the necessity of flirting with a bartender for a freebie—who at least passes for good-looking and is young, which is something in her ageist view—but this? Or is it more a combination of devilment and decent gin at work?

Then she sighs, relents, and shrugs noncommittally.

Philip parks himself beside Caroline, maintaining a respectful distance, not crowding her in; Gillian, sitting diagonally across from them, plays amused spectator and endures another foul look from the head bitch of the corner booth.

“So tell me, ‘Gertrude,’” he begins. “What do you do for a living?”

Gillian butts in. “Gertrude’s a gynecologist,” she says. “And I’m an astronaut. And you—” She guffaws and her glass wavers temptingly in front her mouth, commencing a beauty competition between the sparkling points of ice in the gin bath and her delighted grin. “—are barking up the wrong tree, mate.”

Now Caroline believes there is no ambiguity in the glance she gives Gillian as she mentally telegraphs the words quite clearly and intensely: _I am going to fucking kill you._

Uncomprehending, Philip laughs again and shakes his head. “You two are _hilarious,_ ” he says.

“Oh, I’m not at all,” Caroline replies, while trying to kick Gillian under the table. Instead her foot strikes a solid table leg, and she grimaces. “But dear old Alice is a nonstop fun zone when she’s pissed.”

“Ah, but I see the merits in a serious woman as well,” Philip says. “And that struck me about you, when I first saw you. You’re quite—stately.”

Caroline resists rolling her eyes. “I’m not a ship.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t quite find the word. But you’re striking, I must say.” He pauses and, unfortunately for him, hits upon it. “Magnificent.”

That word, from the wrong person and not the right one, made her dislike it even more. Although in retrospect, Kate calling her that had not been so bad. First and foremost, she had thought herself unworthy of the designation. Then she thought of magnificence as something achieved by a thing—a horse or a statue, or a statue of a horse, or a piece of legislation granting people freedom or someone the right to vote or marry or have a chicken in every pot, and all Caroline wanted was not magnificence but simply to be desired, to be loved. But in her bloody, narrow-minded focus on semantics, she never realized she had already attained it.

In the meanwhile, Gillian guzzles gin.

The awkward silence continues as Caroline thinks frantically on extracting herself from this situation. In days past unwanted attention was usually deflected by a wedding ring—even when, ironically and mistakenly, the ring could signify desperation with no strings attached. Regardless she always had that readymade, ironclad excuse of marriage, a sort of intangible armor offering scant but consistent protection from male idiocy. Now she is all without. She knows from the experiences of others that saying one was lesbian to certain men proved more an enticement than a deterrent, so that little bit of essential identity is, not surprisingly, worthless to the rest of the world.

She’s wondering if she should just leg it—whether Gillian wants to come with or shag either this knobhead or the gangly bartender is entirely up to her, Caroline is annoyed enough not to care—when she is startled by a stockinged foot that slowly strokes the back of her calf, a foot that, based on the direction it’s coming from, is presumably Gillian’s because if it is Philip, then he must have the rubbery flexibility of a Hindu god and even _that_ quality did not make him attractive in the least. Also, the very long, sensual stroke of the foot reminds her quite distinctly of the way Gillian had unabashedly worshipped her legs—warm palm gliding along the curves of her calves and over her strong thighs, tender lips that filled in the dimpled back of her knees—a brief delirious flashback that prompts Caroline to polish off the rest of her drink in one long gulp. She exhales into the empty glass and the icy blowback soothes her flushed face. The heat between her thighs, however, is a different matter.

“Good heavens,” Philip says.

Gillian smirks. She reaches down as if to retrieve something under the table, but in all likelihood is attempting to slip her foot back into her sneaker.

“Can I get you another?” he offers.

“Good God, no,” she says.

“If you’ll pardon me—”Abruptly Gillian stands and it sends Caroline into a panic: What the hell is she doing _now_?

Like a record needle dragged over an old album, Caroline’s voice skips and screeches at a scenario played out within her mind too many times, and with a different person. But the song remains the same: “Where’re you going?”

“Just have to tend to a couple things, Gertie. Hit the pisshole for starters, see a man about a horse—you know, important-like things. Because,” she blathers as she walks away from them backward and Caroline hopes she doesn’t trip over a banquette or something, “as the premiere astronaut in the United Kingdom’s Space Program—”

“We have a space program?” Philip asks.

“—I have certain responsibilities, ’cause you know, I’m always on call, like James Bond.” With a thumb’s up she turns around and plows through the bar door, which is adjacent to the lobby of the hotel.

Caroline watches her swagger away; even alone and desolate in the pit of heterosexual pickup culture, she is at least grateful for a parting glimpse of that wondrous ass.

“Your friend is, er, quite interesting,” Philip says. “Entertaining.”

“Yep.” It’s official: She’s tipsy— _why, fucking vermouth, why are you doing this to me? I thought we had a deal that you would be weak and watery enough for me to keep my head,_ she wails internally—and a hair’s breadth away from completely not giving a fuck about anything. 

“Are you certain you don’t want another drink?”

“You’re very transparent, Philip. But since it feels a sin to sit in a bar without a drink, then please do bring me another.” At the very least it achieves the effect of getting rid of him for a couple minutes so she can decide what to do next. She could leave right now, call Gillian on the mobile, and tell her to rendezvous at the Jeep—if that’s what she wanted to do. In her current state she’s so befuddled as to what—or who—Gillian wants that she wonders if Gillian even knows what or who she wants herself.

She pats her coat pockets, digs through her purse, and then remembers she’s left the mobile in the Jeep. And she’s too bloody affected by drink to drive anyway.

What about what I want? Caroline asks herself. She ended it. She must stand by the decision. She told William it was done. This morning, when she told him that she would be driving Alan and Celia to the train station, he had asked if Gillian would be with her then. The quavering pause before he said her name was all Caroline needed to know of his discomfort—this despite his protests to the contrary.

This emotional stalemate and the absent mobile leave her sitting still. Philip returns, armed with another drink. As she sips tepidly he bores aggressively by talking at length about his business—something to do with engineering, pipelines, infrastructure. She decides she will give Gillian ten minutes—maybe fifteen—before politely or not-so-politely excusing herself and departing.

Lo, Gillian appears again—twenty minutes later and with the languorous, self-satisfied stride of someone who’s just spent a significant time either reading or indulging in philosophical contemplation on the toilet. To Caroline’s annoyance she makes a beeline for the young bartender. She’s giving him the cheeky-sexy grin and leaning over the bar in such a way to accentuate viewing pleasure of her modest yet pleasing bosom.

Well, it’s all about quality over quantity, right? Caroline thinks. And they fit so perfectly in my hands—shit. To quell these thoughts she takes a bracing hit of the vermouth. She needs to eat something and wait a bit before driving. A single glance of her watch tells her that the sun is already waltzing with the horizon. Wonderful. Whole day shot to hell. Not that she had anything to do anyway except read about talking polar bears.

Then Gillian stands in front of their corner booth, holding a bottle of what appears to be champagne—a modestly priced Taittinger—and tossing something that looks like a credit card onto the table.

“You in, toff bitch?” she says.

It’s a key card to a hotel room.

“Oh,” Philip says. “So you _are_ staying here as well?”

Gillian watches her steadily—not with homicidal appraisal, but with the reined-in longing of a woman who knows disappointment better and more intimately than any lover, and who still somehow possesses the courage and the wherewithal for a beautiful, last-ditch gesture. “Well?”

Remember, Caroline thinks, the last time you were in a hotel with a woman who wanted you? Remember how epically you fucked it up? Are you going to be afraid again? She leans forward, takes the key card, and suggestively runs a finger along its plastic edge. “What is this?”

“Your get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“I see.”

“Come on, head bitch of Paris,” Gillian says softly. “Queen of Yorkshire.”

“Oh, I do like the sound of _that._ ” And, she wonders while looking at Gillian, which part do you play? Consort? Jester? Lady-in-waiting? Robin Hood?

“Thought you would.” This time Gillian is serenely triumphant, as she was in the Jeep after that first time, where she successfully pled her case for a continuance. “So then—?”

“What if I say no?”

“Then I reckon I’m drinking a whole bottle of champagne in a hotel room by myself whilst watching _Holiday Inn_.”

“That sounds so sad and pathetic.”

“Yeah, ’cause to be honest I don’t even like musicals that much.” Gillian grins sheepishly. Nerves betray her as her thumb flicks nervously at the folds and gathers of foil atop the Taittinger bottle.

“Well then.” Decisively, Caroline smacks the tabletop and rises. “Guess I better go sleep with you.”

“Oh,” Philip finally says. He rubs his brow. “Damn it, I should have known.”

 “Yes,” she replies somewhat apologetically, while smoothing her skirt. “You really should have.”

Only after tumbling drunkenly into the elevator—laughing too loudly for the comfort of the fossilized staff and travel-traumatized guests that they pass along the way—that Caroline realizes they left him with the bill. The elevator clanks and whizzes, whirs and lurches as she pins Gillian against the elevator’s dimly lit mirrored backdrop and kisses her. Gillian’s free hand flails against the panel in an effort to hit the button for the fifth floor and instead hits the fourth floor, then slams against a shrill alarm bell that startles them both and makes them laugh all over again, then finally finds the button for the fifth. Her arms drape around Caroline’s neck; she’s still clutching the champagne and the cold bottle rests along Caroline’s shoulder, the chill bleeding slowly through her wool jacket. Her kisses taste of gin and blood and the devil, of bad decisions before they turn rancid with regret, of sweet sicknesses chronic with longing, every bit of it terribly wonderful and imperfectly true.

“I thought you were going to leave me there,” Caroline manages to say during a lull in the furious kissing.

Gillian pulls back, regards her quite seriously. “Wouldn’t have done that to you.”

“You didn’t have a plan B with the bartender?”

“You know,” Gillian says, “for a dyke, you’ve got shit gaydar.”

She lets the _dyke_ comment pass. Why pamper life’s complexity when the denim runs smooth on her beautiful ass?  “What—?”

“He was gay, you twat.”

“But he gave you a free drink.”

“And a discount on the champagne. I told him I was trying to seduce you and needed all the help I could get.”

“Well, we know _that’s_ a lie.”

“Yeah. Because you know what?”

“Hmm?” Caroline lazily kisses and bites her neck.

“You’re frighteningly easy.”

After a brief detour to the fourth floor, in which it took a good fifteen minutes for them to (1) stop making out in the hallway and (2) realize they were on the wrong floor, they finally reach the room on the fifth floor. Which, confusingly, looks exactly like the fourth floor and Gillian says something about _The Shining_ and Caroline thinks they’ve fucked it up again until the key card clicks in the right slot and magically grants them access.

In a hotel room, there is no tangible history. Nothing affixes its occupants to the past in either a general or a personal sense. In this room—a sad contrast with baroque bar and lobby, a victim of a modern renovation both bland and beige—there are no dog-eared books or unread feuilletons reminding her of John, no slant of morning light gliding along Kate’s bare shoulder, no tatty quilt prompting her to wonder how many lovers Gillian’s had. There is nothing, and it’s a relief.

She’ll gladly toast to nothingness. She grabs the champagne from Gillian—who flops onto the bed with sneakers still on and anchors one dirty heel into the bedspread—and with minimal effort from both thumbs sends the cork ricocheting off a wall and narrowly missing a questionable lampshade. Pity, she thinks. She was actually aiming for the lamp.

“Shit, that better not leave a mark,” Gillian says.

A sticky froth runs over Caroline’s hand and drips on the rug. The lip of the bottle is cold against her mouth as she tilts it back and sucks in a generous draft. A million bubbles burst in heady sweetness on her tongue. _Come quickly,_ _I’m tasting stars_ —this, supposedly said by Dom Pierre Perignon, the Benedictine monk who first made champagne, seems no less appropriate hundreds of years later.

“Hey,” Gillian slurs. “Don’t drink all that.”

“You want some, you’ll have to take off your pants.”

Gillian only narrows her eyes with mock irritation and commands gently, “Come here.”

“Say please.”

“Fuck off and come here, please.”

Defiant, Caroline takes another hit of the champagne. Then she takes off her jacket, drapes it over a chair, and begins to unbutton her blouse. She feels her power: Instead of lounging indolently, Gillian now sits up at the edge of the bed. The closer she gets the more Gillian avoids her gaze, so much so that when she’s close enough to touch, Gillian is staring past her at a vanishing point far away. It doesn’t, however, prevent her from taking the bottle from Caroline and sucking down nearly half of it.

“This—well, it’s a better sendoff, don’t you think?” Gillian says with tentative gentleness.

Caroline glances toward the window. From a sliver between the gaping curtains she watches flurries sway down from the sky upon the city. Could this have been a beginning too? She doesn’t know. “This isn’t supposed to be romantic,” she mutters helplessly.

“I know.” Gillian takes another drink of Mother Courage, swipes at her mouth, and sits the bottle on the floor. “I know. But I wanted—” Troubled, Gillian stops.

Caroline hesitates only a moment before asking, before dipping a toe into Gillian’s unfathomable depths. She runs a hand through Gillian’s hair, pulling gently enough to tilt her face upward. “You wanted what?”

“A better ending. I guess. I don’t know.” With every flutteringly frantic blink of her eyes, Gillian shutters off the truth.

And Caroline knows nothing else to do than what they came here for. “Well.” She pushes Gillian back onto the bed. “I can provide that.”

She’s on Gillian, kissing her neck, fumbling with her belt. Gillian, on the other hand, tries to simultaneously push off Caroline’s blouse and remove her own jacket—an object lesson in multitasking failure. Amid the whisk and hiss of their determined but drunken movements, they grapple with clothes and with each other.

Smooth as a wrestler, Gillian slips out from underneath her, gently flips her so that she is face-to-face with the stiff, quilted bedspread alive in a riotous sensory assault of pastel colors. She tries not to think of bedbugs. When Gillian slips a hand up her skirt and massages the back of her thigh, the thought is successfully banished. Gillian nudges her thighs apart even further with her knee, her fingers slowly trace a thin boundary of elastic as she toys with the prospect of removing Caroline’s silky underpants.

 She’s also half-sprawled over Caroline and breathing heavily into her back. “I never told you,” Gillian says. Her voice is muffled.

“Told me what?” Caroline squeezes her eyes shut. If she gets fucked in this position she knows she’ll come ridiculously fast. Everything, she thinks, even the serious pleasure of sex, passes by far too quickly.

“That time we were at that hotel—making the wedding arrangements. I never told you how much—I liked—I liked being mistaken for your woman.” Her hands move further afield, coursing idly around Caroline’s thighs, and the axis of power continues on its unpredictable tilt-a-whirl. “Highlight of my week.”

Caroline attempts joking. “What a shitty week you must have had.”

“No different from any other—week, day, month, year, really.” Gillian’s fingers snare the waistband of her underwear. “But, you know, I couldn’t believe it. That they thought someone like me—was with you.” She pauses. “You really are so beautiful.”

It is only now Caroline realizes that Gillian has said this every single time they’ve gone to bed: _You are beautiful._ Whispered reverentially during preliminaries, moaned during the act itself, or sleepily declared afterward. She dwells upon this discovery, briefly losing track of time, before opening her eyes. Did they both fall asleep for a while? Dusk encroaches upon the room. She hears Gillian undressing: zipper undone, belt buckle clanking as it hits the floor, the swish of a shirt removed. Then she is undressing Caroline with drunken, gentle awkwardness, clumsily peeling off a blouse and a skirt, swatting away discarded undergarments with irritated disgust as if they are dusty cobwebs. But when at last they are both naked she becomes a sexual maestro once again, filled with pure focus and intent. Nothing interferes with that—not even three gin and tonics topped off with a generous amount of champagne.

In twilight her eyes are a softened, inscrutable gray. She lies between Caroline’s legs, pressing into her, and begins a slow, sensual, and maddening grind resplendent in its gradual escalation of a grandly plotted torture. Desperate to increase the intensity and rhythm of the contact, Caroline grips her hips. The almost-mocking, leisurely pace of fucking continues unabated and Caroline feels as if she’s going to lose her mind. None of her usual prompts seem to work: She nips as Gillian’s lips when they kiss. She draws not blood but a throaty moan. She bites Gillian’s shoulder, her teeth linger against skin as a ravening threat. She rises, arching to meet Gillian’s thrusts, and she pulls at Gillian’s hair, a generous handful of softness lacing through her fingers delicate as water. When her hand digs into Gillian’s back she feels the scar there and she hesitates, a finger trembles above it like a divining rod.

Gillian moves faster now and Caroline doesn’t know if she’s finally ceding to Caroline’s wishes or the random will of the universe or simply because she wants to forget the scars on her back and in her mind, and here Caroline realizes that her own desires include, most importantly, a desire to make Gillian happy; with drunken abandon she admits to herself that either Gillian or the universe wants something more out of her, although she does not know what and she does not stop to consider the necessity of dragging the universe into her epiphany as some sort of philosophical safety blanket.

She is close, so close, but manages one shaky whisper: “What do you want?"

Gillian closes her eyes, presses her face against Caroline’s cheek. “Tell me a lie—tell me you love me.”

It is too hard to distinguish anymore what is the truth and what is the lie. The lie turns in on itself; an autoimmune deficiency of the heart becomes the truth. Fortunately for Caroline, she's too busy surrendering to the undertow of an orgasm and drowning under a wave of sweet salt oblivion to commit to lies, truth, or the shadowed continent between them. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As of this writing, the actress Monica Vitti is still alive.
> 
> The Ted Hughes poem that Gillian quotes from is “February 17th.” (It is a rather brutal and bloody piece, not for the faint of heart.)


	10. like a book elegantly bound, but in a language that you can’t read

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Angsty chapter, written from Gillian's POV, mentions physical (but not sexual) abuse. I don't think it is graphic, but wanted to mention it just in case... 
> 
> Chapter title from that old Death Cab for Cutie song, "I Will Possess Your Heart"

The truth is, Caroline snores. Worse than any man Gillian’s ever been with.

The first time had been an unpleasant surprise. Gillian had been all sorts of triumphant and pleased with herself for getting Caroline off like that and in the afterglow that followed, she fell asleep on top of Caroline like a great bloody conqueror—the Genghis Khan of cunnilingus, something grand like that, so she liked to imagine. Her head was aligned near Caroline’s stomach and the gurgling emanating from within functioned as a weird lullaby, as if she were lying atop an aquarium with her ear to the glass and listening in on some underwater conversation between a jellyfish and a barracuda. She was nearly asleep when a tectonic shift occurred: A low-grade grinding noise unleashed itself from Caroline’s body as if a power tool mysteriously roared to life and was left unattended to buzz on into a god-awful ceaseless bloody eternity.

After sliding off Caroline’s body, she attempted a solution: Hoping that a change in position would ameliorate the noise factor, she struggled to roll over Caroline over, either on to her side or her belly. Apparently this method had been attempted by previous bedmates because it elicited an angry groan and a lazy flailing hand flopping against Gillian’s face. By the time Caroline—of her own somnambulant free will—finally turned over, thus drastically reducing the ferocity and volume of the snoring to telephone-pervert heavy breathing, Gillian was wide-awake and ready to leave.

This time she’s awakened not by Caroline’s snoring but a dream, one of those nightmares composed of snapshots where nothing real bad happens; it’s all mood and menace and half-imagined, half-remembered things. Like random, single frames of a film, different scenes splayed across the cutting room floor: Seen and not seen. In the dream Eddie is alive—roaming the farm, sitting on the edge of her bed, their bed—fantastically real and resurrected as a rebel angel ready to drag her down to hell, with blood slathered along one side of his head, with that terrible grin he gave her whenever he was about to smack her one.

She remembers that smile very well. After they married it didn’t take long before she realized the grin was an unintentional warning, and it didn’t take him long to figure out she knew that. Then he would smile merely to scare her. Sometimes he would not smile at all and give her a good swift crack across the face anyway, for no viable reason. He would laugh then, a delighted laugh like a child getting one over on the adults, or winning at a game after so many ignominious defeats. _Got you that time!_ The element of surprise was always immensely satisfying for him.

The hotel room is chilly. Every gulp of air makes her nauseous; she hasn’t eaten a thing since morning. Without thinking she touches her nose, confirming that it hasn’t randomly commenced bleeding as if she is some patron saint of abused wives, that her face is still somehow intact. Fuck knows nothing else is. Not that it ever was, really. Hands shaking, she rubs her face and looks at Caroline—who sleeps undisturbed, who probably has nightmares about pleats and dreadlocks and insubordinate underlings. Actually she can only make out the dark outline of Caroline’s body, sees only the folds and gathers of the blanket taper off along her skin as the sea surrenders to the shore, leading up to the white gold of her hair against the pillow.

It’s after midnight and the hotel room throbs with that eerie emptiness particular to cities, energy that presses in on quiet, abandoned corners and rooms and alleys and parking lots, a curving distortion of sound and light and life.

Gillian’s head throbs in time with this silent rhythm. She gets out of the bed, swaying a bit as she stands. Her hands cup darkness as she swims through ambient night, seeking guideposts to the bathroom teasingly hinted at in thin strands of light from the window blinds. One such marker leading the way is a sharp corner—some bit of furniture—that jams into her bare thigh before she makes it to the loo. The light in the bathroom buzzes brightly and makes her head thrum all over in a heightened, accelerated fashion. She gulps down water, washes her face, won’t give the mirror the satisfaction of telling her off. Because she already knows she’s a bloody fucking idiot. In gin and tonic veritas. It’s no surprise.

Astonishment is not something that comes easily to her. That first time Eddie hit her counts as such a time. She would have laughed in disbelief at the whole thing save for the pain rocketing through her face and a sloppy spray of blood that landed against the side of the refrigerator; a large drop of blood sagged from a tiny magnetized calendar from a petrol station, something that mesmerized her as she fell down from the force of the blow and wisely remained on the floor, too stunned to know what to do and anticipating, even then, that he wanted nothing more than an excuse to kill her. Even later after she cleaned it up she still imagined the blood drop there, fatter and fuller in recollection. Every time she looked at the calendar she saw it. At the end of that year she couldn’t take the calendar down fast enough.

A day later he said it wouldn’t happen again. He cried. He begged her to hit him back, with her fists, with a hammer, with anything. _Do it for fuck’s sake,_ he said. He loved her fierceness, her strength, he said. _That’s why I picked you. You were the one. You’re strong. You can take it._ She kept refusing and he sobbed at her feet and buried his face in her lap, as bent and penitent as any sinner in a cheap religious tableau and as such, despite his sincerity, entirely unconvincing to her. A second astonishment followed—the recognition of emotions that had never before affixed themselves in the vast constellation of feelings she possessed for him. Namely pity and disgust. She stroked his hair—how she had loved his hair, how she cannot think of it now without seeing it forever matted in blood and tissue—forgave him, and imagined a map of emotions redrawn: new firmaments discovered, love and desire collapsing as dying stars.

Afterward he always became—for a while, anyway—exceptionally tender and attentive in bed. It made her nervous. Wary of his unpredictability, she grew afraid to touch him. As if he were glass. It all became clear to her then: He was right. He was the fragile one.

But his penitence, a mere hangover of guilt, always wore off and once again she would be subjected to his moods, his tests. All marriages had tests—this she knew from even casual observation of her parents’ marriage. Like enduring a visit from your mother-in-law or going out because the wife wants to when you’d rather stay in and watch telly. Eddie’s tests, unfortunately, were not as mundane. Once he had managed to get a revolver from Robbie somehow—a lie involving vermin on the farm, or fear of a break-in, some such shit—and he would force her to play Russian roulette. The only thing was she never knew if the gun stocked six bullets or one or if it lay as completely empty as her heart.

 _Trust me?_ he’d say, resting the revolver against her temple.

Then the hammer would strike an empty chamber and she would try not to tremble, cry, or otherwise betray a single sliver of fear. The correct response was laughter, because that’s what he would do. Eventually she hid the gun deep in the rafters of the barn—confident he would never find it because he did not know the nooks and crannies of the barn half as well as she did—and feigned ignorance at its disappearance. Of course he didn’t believe her and thought that a couple kicks in the ribs with a pair of heavy boots would draw out a confession. It didn’t.

In a fetal curve on the floor, she could not breathe. Every breath hurt, even short shallow bullish ones through her nose.

_Christ oh Christ you are tough. I always knew that._

Manic and drunk and ranting, he paced the kitchen for what felt like hours as she lay on the floor. Then he stopped abruptly and doubled over as if he were going to vomit. He fell to his knees and gasped out another worthless apology.

_Oh Christ oh Christ, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry._

She wondered if her ribs were broken.

_Always knew from the start—you were the one for me. But you test me, Gillian. You test me. Don’t act like you don’t know. You do._

His fate was her mistake.

_And so I have to test you. I need to know I can trust you._

Trust. Why did it always have a bloody expiration date? How many times did you have to prove it? How the fuck could you ever prove it once and for all, to anyone’s satisfaction?  

She blinks away the memory. For now, anyway. She knows she should leave. It wouldn’t be the first time she would ditch someone in a bedroom without a word. But she’s sitting naked on a toilet seat shivering with cold and her clothes are in the other room and how the bloody hell would she get home anyway, what with being in Halifax and the Land Rover still sitting in Caroline’s driveway in Harrogate. And she’s fucking exhausted. With goose bumps congealing on her arms she stumbles out of the bathroom without turning off the light and clambers back into the bed.

The penumbra of light from the bathroom gives shape and shadowy substance to the rest of the room. It also wakes up Caroline. She stirs and turns over. The movie-star muss of her hair—Gillian thinks of the real Monica Vitti—and the sensual drape of the blanket over her body provide seemingly irrefutable evidence of her perfection. It’s a surface perfection, one that Gillian initially loathed until she discovered that Caroline was nearly as fucked up as she was. Loathing begat begrudging admiration of how Caroline kept herself, her career, her home so beautifully interlocked and intact. Her life seems a Rubik’s cube with five sides solid complete and one side bloody chaos, never to be solved. Her perfect exterior and indecipherable interior reminds Gillian of beautiful old rare books seen in her school’s library so many years ago, filled with words and languages she would never understand. And yet Gillian has always been drawn, irresistibly so, to the secrets of the cube, to the languages she cannot interpret.

Begrudging admiration gave way to thoughts of conquest. She always knows, instinctually and effortlessly, when someone wants her. It helps that most men are remarkably unsubtle; even so, Gillian can discern finer signals, like a heated glance held too long or a lingering yet accurate suspicion that someone is checking out your ass. Or more obvious ones, like when someone goes off on you like a banshee because you’ve stolen her parking space and all you can think about is slamming her up against a wall and kissing her senseless. That was another astonishment, that rare and immediate attraction, since she hadn’t felt that way about a woman in what seemed an eon. But then there were very few women in her life and definitely no women like Caroline; if there were, she’d be in a hell of a lot more trouble on a regular basis and her reputation as a slag would reach legendary proportions.

Now it’s led to this, a knotted terrible tension of things she cannot say and should not feel.

She sits upright in bed, cocooned in a blanket as protection from the cold and from the current of Caroline’s sleepy yet intent squint. They haven’t said a word to each other the remainder of this night, aside from Caroline mumbling “sorry” before they fell asleep earlier. About two hours later they woke and repeated the cycle: drinking, fucking, sleeping. The bottle is empty now. Gillian wishes that the bottle were not empty, wishes for oblivion, wishes that all these things she wanted were not mere wishes.  

Caroline isn’t looking at her now, but staring at the ceiling. She places fingers against Caroline’s lips, requesting entry. Caroline closes her eyes, opens her mouth, and lets Gillian in. They have done this before, the first time, and it proved another astonishment—that Caroline trusted her so easily. Even after the confession. Even as her own thoughts had darkened that evening and beyond: _Go on, let the murderer in your bed. Let her take you any way she likes. Nice bit of slumming there, Oxford bitch. Something to tell your friends at your next alumni weekend._

Her fingers curl carefully into Caroline’s mouth, an animal settling into a new habitat—cautious, careful, and reverent of the teeth denting her skin. Slowly she explores—stroking a tongue, climbing the velvety interior of the cheek, grazing the cavernous palate. Her breathing hitches as Caroline starts sucking her fingers.

It had been another one of Eddie’s tests—putting his fingers, sometimes even a fist, in her mouth, pushing and pushing deeper and deeper until she gagged. He wanted to know how much she could take. She could take a lot, although one time did she pass out. Which meant she failed that test.

Is she now testing Caroline? Or herself?

The thought scares her so much that she pulls her fingers out of Caroline’s mouth. Caroline’s lips glisten darkly in the shadows, a red nebula flashing across the troubled tiny universe of the hotel room. She shivers again but not from the cold. Gently Caroline pulls her down and unwraps her from the blanket as if she is a gift. This level of caution and care is so frightening and alien to Gillian that, fleetingly, she wants to stop—or cry, she can’t decide which—and the nape of her neck prickles with unaccountable dread. She almost says _don’t_ but skin against skin warms her, and the reassuring weight of Caroline’s body on hers and the breathing that finds harbor in the hollow between her neck and shoulder feel good, all of it does—the slow descent, the gentle attentions, all of it markedly different from previous occasions. Even the way she gets sucked off feels an inviolable, strangely sacred act. In this delicate persistence Gillian recognizes penance.

When it’s over Caroline rolls over on her stomach and commences snoring lightly into a pillow. Gillian watches the rise and fall of her back. Her hand sways along Caroline’s soft, soft skin, her knuckles curl into a fleshy dune. Every inch of Caroline seems smooth and strong; Gillian thinks she’s built like a swimmer. She would like to see that, would like to see Caroline swimming—not just to see her in a bathing suit, although there’s that too—but to witness her cutting a confident seam through a wavering bolt of blue and watch the water, frothy and trembling in her wake, seamlessly stitch itself back together.

Which brings Gillian to the problem at hand: pulling herself back together so easily, so completely, in the wake of all this.


	11. the empire of enchiladas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Concluding chapter to this story. Big thank you to all you folks following along, and for your comments. Just keep in mind…to quote the great Yogi Berra, it ain’t over till it’s over. And it ain’t quite over yet. :)

**xi. the empire of enchiladas**

 The decibel range for a snorer of modest capabilities tops off around 50 decibels; in more severe cases, however, it can extend from 60 to 80 decibels. To compare, human conversation averages about 65 decibels, intense automobile traffic reaches levels of 85 decibels, and a New York City subway easily ascends to over 100 decibels. Viewed from the perspective of these higher amounts and despite the unanimous disapproval of everyone she’s ever slept with, Caroline’s snoring level of 65–70 decibels seems, if not innocuous, then at least not entirely hazardous to a listener’s physical health. Especially considering that once she hits the high end of that range—with the roaring sensation of possessing a buzzsaw within her chest—she usually wakes herself up.

As happens now.

She wakes into a dream—at least this is how her new reality feels: unbelievable, unearned. It’s the day after Christmas. She’s in her own bed. With Kate. Who is laughing.

A breakfast tray shares the bed with them, overloaded with a pot of tea, a cup of coffee, scones, cream, jam, some yogurt, a couple pears, and an ornament that William had plucked off the tree and placed on the tray as Caroline cautiously waddled upstairs with it a nearly two hours ago. She stubbed her toe on a stair and the cream sloshed over the dispenser’s edge, but otherwise the tray made it into the bedroom intact. Another Christmas miracle.

Presumably, Kate laughs at her snoring. At least that’s what Caroline hopes, and not her bleary eyes, blotchy morning skin or, worst case scenario, in recollection of last night’s clumsily exhilarated lovemaking. At least this is how she casts her performance in the theatre of her own mind. As her laughter trails, Kate busies herself with eating the last scone—this after a plate of eggs at six this morning and immediately afterward professing an urge for an enchilada. While somewhat uncertain about what constituted an enchilada or even its country of origin, Caroline nonetheless frantically looked up recipes for enchiladas on her iPad. By the time she had about a dozen bookmarked—Cheese! Chicken! Black bean! Quinoa and corn! Avocado! Avocado and crab! Avocado and shrimp! An entire bloody universe of enchiladas existed and  _Caroline had no idea_!—and was ready to storm the nearest grocer in a vain quest for tortillas, Kate had moved on to rhapsodizing about peanut butter brownies, a longed-for special treat that her mother used to make. This is in turn prompted a note-to-self typed in an app she never used:  _Call K’s mother for recipe._

“You know,” Kate says, “I’ve missed you, and I missed a lot of things about you—” Here she flicks crumbs of lemon scone off her lips with the tip of her thumb, and the casual elegance of the gesture distracts Caroline from the otherwise disturbing and mildly infuriating fact that someone is quite blatantly spilling food particles in her bed. “—but I  _really_  did not miss the snoring.”

Once again self-conscious, Caroline only smiles sheepishly but does not move from her prone position. “Sorry.”

“Well, I worry.” She looms over Caroline, fussily pushing Caroline’s bangs back off her forehead while squinting critically at Caroline’s nose, the moment illustrating beautifully the determined concern that she possesses and focuses with full, quiet force on anyone she cares about. Even as Caroline silently acknowledges that Kate will be a wonderful mother, she mulls over the confluence of her perpetual doubt with Kate’s sterling certainty.

“Maybe you have—what is it?” Kate narrows her eyes. “Sleep apnea? Or a deviated septum?”

“A deviated septum? Would that be like having two sets of genitals?”

Kate laughs, shakes her head. “Be serious.”

“I can’t.” A pause. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“You keep saying that.” Playfully Kate taps her forehead. “Now I’m worried about your memory.”

“Stop worrying about me.”

“You  _are_  older than me.”

“I don’t need that pointed out on a regular basis, thank you.”

“We’re being  _really_  lazy,” Kate protests. “Lying around in bed all morning. It’s afternoon now. It’s not healthy.” She mulls over the implications of this late breakfast in bed. “Maybe I’ll get a blood clot. Maybe  _you’ll_  get a blood clot—”

She tugs on Kate’s pajamas, pulling her down, silencing her—albeit temporarily—with a kiss. Unsurprisingly, given her history, Kate’s current condition has rendered her obsessed with health. Meanwhile, Caroline dwells upon safety in a cruelly indifferent world: Walking could be as dangerous as bungee-jumping across the Grand Canyon. The very act of breathing could be fatal. It’s a wonder they even made love last night. She felt horribly selfish for wanting it, even though Kate had happily green-lighted her advances through a playful threat:  _Stop acting like a prude or I’ll put on some Marvin Gaye._ Despite all this nearly paralyzing self-criticism and her raging set of nerves before and during the act, Caroline thinks she acquitted herself rather well. She understands now, however, how men must feel when having it off with a pregnant woman. It was like the first time you cook a soufflé: The breathless desire as you undertake the task, the palpable yearning for success, the overwhelming awareness of your ham-fisted attempts at delicacy, the sense that disaster would strike if you were not careful. Verily, if she had a bucket list, this was one item she could successfully cross off.

“Look,” Caroline manages to say in a break between rather furious and intense kissing, “as you’ve pointed out rather cruelly—which is  _quite_  unlike you—I’m ancient, and I need recovery time from last night’s stellar performance.”

“Oh, look at you. Very smug.”

“I know.” Caroline’s smile fades. “I mean, it was all right—wasn’t it?”

“God.” Kate wriggles, burrows deeper into the bed, and regards Caroline with mock seriousness. “It’s like you weren’t there.”

“No, I have the rug burns to prove it.” As Kate breaks into giggles Caroline seriously considers the advantage of kneepads. Lawrence had kneepads for some ridiculous sport, didn’t he? She could steal them. It would save her the idiocy of going into some store to buy them. Or were there sex boutiques online where—?

Kate’s practical reality intrudes upon her practical imagination: “We really should get up.”

“No.” As a preemptive strike against further guilt tripping, Caroline initiates another round of kissing. This time she moves further afield from lips to cheek, jawline, neck—why, there is an entire glorious body to explore, and it a more wondrous realization that stumbling upon the empire of enchiladas.  

Caught between arousal and some sort of charming yet misplaced familial duty, Kate sighs sweetly and squirms a bit. “People might be wondering what’s become of you.”

“Sod them all,” Caroline says, going for the cleavage. But there are a lot of tiny buttons on Kate’s pajama top—a Maginot line of defense against sexual activity, discouraging at first, but not insurmountable.

Before Caroline can proceed with strategizing, she is chastised: “Not a very nice attitude for Christmas.”

“It’s not Christmas anymore.”

“Twelve Days of.”

“Bollocks. Twelve Days of Bollocks.”

“Your mobile was vibrating while you were asleep. Might be important.”

“Nope. Nothing’s important right now except you.”

“Could be your mum, could be William, could be Gillian—” Kate arches, clasps a muscle in her back, and groans. “—ow, shit.” She sits up.

“Your back again?”

Kate hums in the affirmative. “Back, bladder, feet, knees.” She swings her legs over the bed and stands, wobbling in such a disconcerting way that Caroline nearly flips the breakfast tray in a desperate attempt to lunge across the bed and grab her. But a long, languid bodily stretch quickly reasserts her strength and grace, even as she parks her hands in the small of her back. “If my body is nothing more than a house for this baby, well, she’s doing an unauthorized renovation.” With that, she waddles—even though Caroline thinks it the most elegant waddling she has ever witnessed in her life—toward the bathroom.

Caroline flops back into the bed and massages her temples, a feeble attempt to sooth the whiplash of tension coursing through her body at the mere casual mention of Gillian.

Despite futile attempts at normalcy, nothing has been quite the same between her and Gillian since the last night they spent together. She woke the next morning to discover that Gillian had ditched her in the hotel room—but, apparently not before neatly folding and stacking Caroline’s clothes on a table. Perhaps her mother was right all along:  _That girl is so peculiar!_ After showering, dressing, and appeasing her hangover with two stale croissants and three tepid coffees at the grimly greasy and spartan hotel “breakfast bar” as it was called, she retrieved her mobile from the car and discovered several short, hysterical texts from William along the lines of  _where are you?_  and one frantic voice mail from him— _I’m really freaking out, I’m so freaked out I’m about to call Dad_. Minutes after that, however, William had left a calmer voice message, informing her that Gillian had texted him with the information that his mother was safe, sound, and passed out in a hotel room in Halifax.

Always his mother’s son, William’s coda to this emotional rollercoaster was sarcastic: _Following your don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy right now_. When Caroline called him that morning before setting off for home, she asked if he had spoken to Gillian at all. No, he said. When he woke in the morning the Land Rover that had been there all evening was gone.

She has no idea how Gillian got to Harrogate to fetch her Land Rover; she suspects that an SOS to Robbie may have gone out. This only bothers her when she thinks about it. Which, admittedly, she hasn’t really done in the past 48 hours.

What she had dwelled upon guiltily and at excruciatingly regular intervals in that two-week period before Christmas were her half-assed, half-hearted, criminally timed, and poorly executed attempts to Talk About It with Gillian. The first occurrence took place during a lull in a wedding rehearsal. It didn’t help that Caroline’s gaze kept flickering apprehensively to Kate, who pounded out a rather loud and furious version of the “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” as if she were Jerry Lee Lewis hopped up on amphetamines and much to the consternation of Celia and the befuddlement of Alan, who helplessly speculated that “perhaps this is boogie woogie version.” All while Caroline attempted formulation of meaningful questions laced with genuine concern:  _Are you all right? Is everything all right with us?_

Gillian had shrugged, twitched, rubbed her neck, and stammered that she was very busy with the farm. And work. And Calamity. And the holidays. At that juncture fate and Raff happily intervened for her: He arrived at the rehearsal with pizza for everyone. She pounced on the pizza and quickly shoved half a slice in her mouth, much to Raff’s amused disgust.

“Very ladylike,” he said.

“Pish off,” his mother snarled around an alarming mouthful of cheese, tomato, and dough. Then she challenged anyone within hearing range to a pizza-eating contest. Everyone knew better not to accept.

If not impressive, it was at the very least an interesting way to end an uncomfortable conversation.

The second time, also spectacularly inconvenient, happened one Saturday when she was out at the farm. She attempted talking to Gillian while the latter was armed with a huge hypodermic needle, straddling a ram—the infamously surly Bernardo Bertolucci—and preparing to inject the poor bastard with God knows what. A risky endeavor, Caroline knew, given Gillian’s moody unpredictability and her own rampant fear of needles; she might end up in a truck off to market. To be fair it was the only bloody moment that day when she found Gillian alone, without a parent or a child or wayward relative hovering about them like demented satellites. Still she could find nothing but careful, generalized banalities to dole out, fearing the raw emotion within:  _I am afraid of you. But not the way you think. I am afraid of what you feel. I am afraid of what I feel._

Buried in the whorls of Bertolucci’s coat Gillian’s fist flexed repeatedly, as if working out a niggling pain. The needle dripped, anointing the toe of her boot. She exhaled a shaky floss of breath that hung in the cold air for less than a second that reminded Caroline of the struggling, ragged breaths, those soft notes of discord, which framed her confession about Eddie. Then she stonewalled Caroline with her beautiful-loser demeanor: that wary squint and wincing smile that Caroline always found so unaccountably compelling as she quoted her beloved throwaway tagline, which distilled in a mere three words her contempt for Caroline’s conceited concern—a more succinct way of saying that in the world of pain she has lorded over these many years, whatever she felt or was feeling about Caroline meant so very little. Particularly in comparison to getting broken physically and emotionally, spiritually and sexually, by someone who claimed to love you, or when you have to live with the guilt of murdering that individual for the rest of your life. Flaccid rejection from a coward was nothing. Even if you were stupidly, intractably in love with that coward. Gillian could not, would not say any of that. So she shrugged and said precisely what Caroline knew she would say.

_We’re cool, Vincent._

Thus their friendship limped along; the frenetic end-stage wedding planning proved a useful distraction. Once again Caroline’s misery was pure and undiluted, as opposed to the potent yet befuddling mixture of misery, sex, drunkenness, comfort, and brief moments of tantalizing euphoria that she experienced with Gillian. Then Christmas Eve happened—Kate walked back into that room, giving her a second chance.

Or was it her third? Fourth? Last? Caroline sits up, runs a hand through her hair. Oh Christ, she thinks, I am such a fuck-up. _That_  hasn’t changed. She has to be honest. She has to come clean. She reaches for the coffee mug on the breakfast tray, finds it empty. When Kate comes back into the room, she’s staring too intently into its emptiness.

In amused recompense, Kate offers her own cup of tea.

As if it were a shot of whisky—and here she thinks back to that fateful first night with Gillian and the scotch that burned a hole in her stomach and set her senses aflame, a prescient sign of everything that happened since—Caroline drains the cup in one long draught.

As Kate sits down, she gently takes the cup. “What is it?”

Unsurprisingly, Kate is an apt scholar in the field of Caroline Elliot—or Dawson, or whoever the bloody hell she is now. While Caroline silently composes neutral wording that, she hopes, will not make her look like a complete arsehole callously using someone for sex—maybe not use the words  _filthy_  or  _sordid_  because they sound bad in a good way or not say  _hey, she was down for it,_ which is, apparently, what the kids say nowadays, at least according to her mother—Kate goes into a mild panic.

“Oh shit.” She clutches the teacup tightly. “Are you having doubts?”

Bewildered, Caroline blinks at her. “What are you talking about?” Even before pregnancy she always marveled at Kate’s mercurial nature, her mind nimbly leaping through any number of thoughts and emotions and yet despite these tendencies, retaining her ranking as one of the most well-adjusted and even-tempered people Caroline has ever encountered. How the hell does she  _do_ that? Caroline now realizes that she herself will forever be at a disadvantage; somehow, she must prepare far, far better for the hairpin turns of mood and circumstance and life that Kate handles with a seemingly effortless equanimity.

“About us. About the baby. About me moving back in.” Kate scrunches up her lovely face in almost childish dismay. “I mean, maybe it is too soon. Maybe I should stay in my own place for a while—”

“No,” Caroline interrupts. “No. I thought we settled all that. I want you here. You shouldn’t be living alone, in your condition.”

Kate frowns. “I’m not an invalid.”

“You’re beautiful when you’re petulant.” She leans in for a kiss, sees Kate is not amused, and backtracks to her shaky resolution. “No, no, I know—look.” She takes a deep breath. “I should tell you—something.”

Just as Kate knows her all too well, Caroline can read an entire epic in the most fleeting of expressions upon her lover’s face. Right now the opening chapter begins:  _Oh shit here you go again doing or saying something knobbish that will ruin everything_   _but I’m going to do my best to give you the benefit of the doubt you beautiful twat because I’m here in your house and I’m committed and I thought you were too, but oh God, now what oh no do I have to pee again?_  Kate clears her throat. “Go on.”

“I was—sort of seeing someone. It wasn’t serious.”  _Not serious for me, anyway. Is that truth enough?_  Probably not, but at the moment the world is a fragile snow globe composed of her and Kate within this room, and everything is pretty and gold as the sun spills in and it is the only thing she will allow in because nothing can shatter this protective dome, nothing can shatter her heart, she cannot bear the thought of losing all this again. And because she cannot risk it, a half-measure of bravery will have to do for now. “It was a casual arrangement.”

Reminiscent of a detective in a police show listening to a criminal confession, Kate watches her with impressive stillness—waiting for the wrong note in her tone, the telltale lie in her words. While her calmness is usually soothing, in some cases it’s unnerving. As it is now.

Apparently her confession has passed critical scrutiny. “All right,” Kate says.

“All right what?” Caroline echoes.

“All right it happened.” Kate takes a breath before a crucial question in her cross-examination. “Is it over?”

Caroline permits herself a moment of bristling self-righteousness. “Of course!”

“Ah, that’s more like the Caroline I know.” Kate smirks wryly. “So it’s over, not as of two minutes ago?”

“No.” Caroline wavers. “Two weeks ago.”

“Wow.” Kate raises her eyebrows. “Okay then.”

Caroline stares at a dust mote hanging listlessly near an electric outlet. How did it get there? How did I get here? “I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“I’ve ruined everything.”

“You’ve ruined nothing.”

“But—”

“But what?”

“You don’t despise me?”

“Why would I?” Kate is genuinely surprised.

And Caroline loves her for it. “I’m weak,” she says softly.

“No. You’re human. You thought we were done. I thought we were done. Perhaps I’d have gone out looking for someone new to distract myself too, but—” Kate gestures at her belly. “Pregnant women are not exactly hot date material—except perhaps among a kinky subset of people, and those people are not exactly what I’m looking for.”

“So I’m not kinky?” Caroline risks a joke.

Kate falls for it. She smiles and waggles her eyebrows. “We’ll work on it.”

Every ounce of tension seeps out of Caroline’s body as she rests her head on Kate’s shoulder. O mercy, she thinks. But she’s not done yet. She goes for broke, for the danger of full disclosure. “You don’t want to know—?” she whispers.

“No.” Kate says it quickly. “I mean, I suppose I’m curious, but—I don’t need to know anything more, at least not now. Unless you want—need—to talk about it?”

“No. I don’t. But I feel like it should be some big bloody confessional—”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No.” Kate pauses. “It doesn’t really matter. At least not to me. What matters is the present. Here and now. Us.”

“Is it really that easy?” Caroline disbelieves her good fortune.

Kate rolls her eyes. “Do you  _want_  it to be difficult? I thought your mum was the real drama queen, not you.”

“No. No. I really thought we were through, and I—Christ, I felt so lonely, and depressed, and I needed comfort. I wanted—I wanted to feel like someone cared for me. Even if it wasn’t real. Even if it wasn’t you.” Caroline rubs her eyes, a distracting gambit that she doubts could truly conceal the tremor of guilt in her hand, her voice, her heart. She waits for Kate to seize upon this, can even hear her saying it:  _Surely you cared a little? Surely she cared a little?_  “I don’t know if I’m making sense. Am I? Do you understand?”

“I do. I mean, basically. Pretty much.” Kate’s fingers trace idly over the teacup rim, the elongated splay of her hand over the chasm of the cup as arrestingly seductive as a detail in an El Greco, a contemplative moment of grace, forgiveness, love stirring to life.

“Really? Then everything is—fine?” It all seems like  _A Wonderful Life._  Scooped out of the abyss, she has caught a glimpse of what her life would be like without Kate, and now somehow the rightful timeline has reasserted itself, only this time without interference from an angel who needed wings. Unless Gillian was the angel? Some sort of shagging angel? Oh stop it, Caroline thinks. At any rate Gillian would, at least, appreciate the film reference; she always seemed slightly amazed and genuinely impressed whenever Caroline could pull off a cinematic allusion from any era.

 _Later,_  Caroline thinks.  _I will tell her later. If she asks. If she wants to know. And it will be all right. It has to be._

“Everything is fine.” Kate takes her hand.

“You’re certain?”

“Yeah. Look.” She pauses, chooses her words deliberately, carefully; it is one of the things that Caroline has always loved about her. “I don’t want to get hung up on the past. I want to go forward—I want  _us_  to go forward. No fear, no worries. Just us. Oh. And the baby. All right?”

“Yeah.” Caroline says absently, while her overactive mind still stumbles about in a stupor of disbelief.

Kate smiles wryly. “You don’t sound convinced.”

“No, it’s not that. Not that at all. I want the same things you want. It’s just, you know, me being me. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the avalanche.”

“Afraid, risk-averse, and pessimistic? All those wonderful things I love about you.”

Caroline pinches her brow. “All right, now I have to ask you again if you’re certain you want to throw in your lot with the likes of me.”

Kate laughs. “Yeah, I do. I had hoped by now you would have caught on that this love thing is not very logical.”

 _Yeah, tell me about it._  For the moment Caroline keeps her guilty, sarcastic thoughts pent up in silence.  

Kate picks up the Christmas ornament on the breakfast tray. A glitzy white-gold spherical bulb with one end shaped like a star and shedding its sparkly coat, it was William’s favorite as a child because he thought it looked like a spaceship; he happily deposited it on the tray this morning as perhaps a way of giving a blessing, of marking a return to a normalcy that he approved of. “But, you know, I like to think things have a way of working out for the best.”

Kate presses the bulb into Caroline’s hand. Silvery freckles lay trace patterns of a new beginning in her palm, stardust against pale skin. Something to build upon. That she now possesses so many gifts, so many opportunities for renewal, it seems almost impossible to fail. Caroline will, however, remain a skeptic to the end of her days. But in this moment she is at least a happy skeptic. She holds the ornament up to the sunlight, where it incubates a faint glow.

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s lovely to think that.”


End file.
